The ambulance turned into my driveway, its lights sweeping red across the front windows, and another contraction pulled tight and low across me, and I shut my eyes and breathed through it the way the books had told me to.

And in the middle of all of it — the sirens, the phone, the collapse happening inside my house — the thing that hit me hardest was not my father at all.

It was that Declan should have been there.

He should have been the one grabbing the packed bag from the hall closet.

He should have been the one telling me I was breathing too fast, timing the contractions on his phone, making some terrible joke because he never knew what else to do when he was frightened.

Instead there was a lawyer in my ear and a stranger’s siren in my driveway and the man who raised me standing inside my home discovering that the plan he’d thought was airtight had no air in it at all.