She nodded and wrote something in the chart. “The doctor will be by this afternoon. If everything looks good, we may be able to discuss discharge tomorrow morning.”
After she left, the room settled back into quiet.
I thought about the house. The locks my father had changed while I lay in this bed. The rooms I had arranged and decorated over three years of a marriage I had believed was difficult but real.
I thought about the nursery specifically. The soft green walls I had painted in the second trimester because every source I read said yellow was too bright and white was too cold for newborn eyes. The small bookshelf I had assembled myself over two evenings because Eric said he would help and then didn’t come home. The mobile I had hung above the crib that turned slowly in the draft from the window.
I was not going back for the furniture. I understood that.
But the mobile mattered to me in a way I could not entirely explain, and I made a quiet note to ask Megan to retrieve it.
“Are you sleeping?” my father asked.
“Thinking.”
“Rest.”
“Dad.”
“Claire.”
This had been our negotiation language since I was a teenager. Two names, exchanged with specific weight, meaning I hear you but not yet.
He settled back in his chair.
Outside the hospital window, the afternoon was moving toward evening. The light had that particular quality of late autumn, golden and slightly sad, the kind that made ordinary things look briefly significant.
I put my hand on my stomach.
The baby moved, a slow rolling shift that I had come to recognize as comfort rather than restlessness.
We were still here. Both of us.
That was where everything had to start.
The divorce would take time. The financial untangling would take longer. There would be attorneys and depositions and documents and negotiations, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I would give birth to a child who deserved a parent who had already decided to be present.
I was already making that decision. Had been making it, I realized, from the moment I told myself no when Eric asked to speak to me alone.
