He expected to find an exhausted wife and a newborn baby. Instead, he opened the front door and collapsed in fear.

Cameron had no idea that while he was eating steak at his mother’s birthday dinner, I was being opened under emergency lights. He had no idea that our daughter, Hannah Joy Hawkins, entered the world without making a sound.

He had no idea that a nurse had placed one hand on my shoulder and whispered that they were working on her, while I lay numb from the chest down, staring at the ceiling and silently bargaining with God.

He didn’t know, because he never showed up. Not that night, not the next morning, not even after the hospital called him from my emergency contact list.

Later, I learned he’d told the nurse that his wife exaggerates, and to call him when there was actual news.

There had been actual news.