“Can we come in?” my mother asked.
I stared at her.
A nurse beside me must have sensed the tension because she quietly said, “Only if you want them here.”
That sentence gave me something I hadn’t felt in my parents’ kitchen.
Control.
“Dad can come in,” I said.
My mother’s face tightened.
“Amelia—”
“Dad can come in.”
The nurse stepped toward the doorway.
My mother left without another word.
My father entered slowly.
He didn’t sit until I told him to.
For several minutes he watched the monitor and said nothing.
Finally, he rubbed both hands over his face.
“I should have called.”
I looked at him.
“Yes.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to soften it.
I didn’t.
“I saw you,” I said.
“You looked straight at me and went back to your newspaper.”
His eyes dropped.
“I thought your mother knew what she was talking about.”
“I asked you.
Not her.”
He swallowed.
“You’re right.”
It was the first apology I could remember receiving from him that didn’t contain the word “but.”
Still, an apology couldn’t erase the kitchen floor.
Another contraction ended the conversation.
Hours compressed strangely after that.
Pain made time unreliable.
Nurses came and went.
A doctor explained what they were watching.
Ethan called whenever he could, sometimes speaking directly to me and sometimes to the medical team with my permission.
My father stayed quiet in a chair near the wall.
My mother waited outside.
Claire arrived sometime later with Daniel.
I knew because I heard my mother’s voice in the hallway rise with relief.
Then Daniel said, “Whose helicopter was that? Your neighbor said one landed in the yard.”
My father answered before my mother could.
“Ethan’s.”
Silence.
Daniel laughed once.
“Ethan doesn’t own a helicopter.”
“Apparently he owns a company that owns several,” my father said.
Another silence.
Even in labor, I almost smiled.
Daniel entered my room about twenty minutes later wearing the expression of a man who had discovered that a quiet person at a dinner party had been holding better cards all along.
“Amelia,” he said carefully, “I had no idea Ethan was involved with Cole Emergency Aviation.”
“He’s not involved with it.”
Daniel waited.
“He built it.”
His face changed.
Claire looked from him to me.
