Chapter 1 — Handle It Yourself

The contraction hit hard enough that I nearly dropped the phone, but my husband’s voice on the other end of it was somehow colder than the tile under my bare feet.

“Handle it yourself, Phoebe.

Stop being so dramatic.”

And then Rowan hung up, because his mother’s birthday dinner was waiting, and went back to it.

For three full seconds I stood in the maternity entrance and stared at the dark screen, unable to make the words line up into a sentence that could be true.

A nurse was already coming toward me with a wheelchair, reading my face faster than I could read my own.

“Is someone on the way, honey?” she asked, steadying my arm as another contraction took me.

I looked at the silent phone in my hand.

“Not my husband,” I said.

I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, standing alone in a hospital doorway with one hand under my belly and warm fluid soaking through my dress.

For months Rowan had promised — sworn, in that easy way of his — that he would be beside me when this happened.

Instead, his mother, Priscilla, had decided her sixtieth birthday dinner was a once-in-a-lifetime family event that could not be missed.

Apparently the birth of our son was a more moveable occasion.

I keep coming back to that word he used — dramatic. It was his favorite word for me, worn smooth from years of use.

Every real need I ever brought him, he handed back relabeled as drama.

When I was frightened, I was being dramatic.

When I was hurt, I was being dramatic.