Chapter 70 Chapter 70

Chapter 70 Chapter 70
The Contraction
Her shoes had been left somewhere inside, somewhere on the concrete floor, and Laura crossed the lot barefoot without even thinking about looking for them.
Derek opened the rear door for them and got behind the wheel without asking a thing. Neither of them spoke until the sedan left the industrial street and turned onto the empty avenue, and by then Laura had already understood that her husband wasn’t going to speak for the rest of the night.
Ethan had her hand between both of his, pressed against his thigh, and he stared out the window without seeing anything on the other side. He wasn’t crying. His jaw was locked in a way that frightened her more than tears would have, because a body couldn’t hold that much tension without eventually exploding somewhere else.
Laura looked at the cuff of his shirt. Then she looked at her own.
The lace of her dress was covered in dust from the floor all the way to her elbow, with a dark stain around her wrist, the color blood takes after it has been out in the open for half an hour.
Mother-in-law’s blood on the daughter-in-law’s dress. In this family, even the clothes tell the whole story.
She pulled the sleeve down over the stain and slipped her husband’s fingers between hers.
“Cavalier.”
He didn’t turn his head.
“I’m here,” she said. “That’s all. You don’t have to answer me.”
Ethan squeezed her hand once and kept staring out the window.

They went onto the bridge, and the sound of the pavement changed beneath the tires.
And that was when it hit her.
It started in her lower back, closed in around her belly, and tightened from the inside with a force that was nothing like the discomfort she had been feeling over the past few weeks. Laura released Ethan’s hand, pressed her open palm against the door, and counted silently without moving a muscle in her face, because she had spent ten years watching other women do exactly that and knew what a woman looked like when she knew how to endure it.
Forty seconds. Forty-five. And it released.
She started breathing slowly again and reached for her husband’s hand.
Not now.
Ethan was still staring out the window. Two hours ago, that man had been dancing a waltz in the garden of his home, and now he had his mother and brother lying dead on the floor of a Bronx warehouse, while she still had the nerve to consider telling him that the baby had decided to arrive that very night.
No. This minute belongs to him.
“Ma’am.”
Derek was looking at her through the rearview mirror.
“Drive, Derek.”
“Ma’am, I saw your face.”
“I saw yours when you walked into that warehouse and I didn’t say anything. Drive.”
Derek turned his eyes back to the road and sped up a little, which was his way of arguing.

They came off the bridge and onto the main avenue.
Laura counted from the first one. Eight minutes, more or less, and the second came.
This one rose differently. It tightened higher, reached her ribs, and knocked the air out of her all at once. Her body bent forward two centimeters and both hands clenched on their own, one against the door and the other over Ethan’s.
And her husband, who had spent half an hour registering nothing that was happening inside that car, turned his head.
“Laura.”
“Nothing.”
“You’re squeezing my hand.”
“Cavalier, look at me. I’m fine.”
She held his gaze while the contraction continued moving through her, and she held her voice steady too, which was the difficult part. At fifty seconds, her belly released and she was able to straighten up.
“See? Nothing.”
Ethan didn’t answer. His eyes dropped to her belly, then to her hand still closed around his, and then back to her face.
And she knew, from the way his mouth tightened, that for the first time since they had left the warehouse, that man had stopped thinking about his mother. That his fear had changed.
There it is. I stole his minute.
“How long?”
“Cavalier.”
“How long, Laura?”
She settled back against the seat and decided that lying to a man who had lost half his family in two hours was a very ugly way to begin what she had left.
“Since the bridge.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“How far apart?”
“Eight minutes.”
Ethan leaned forward and put his hand on the back of Derek’s seat.
“To the clinic.”
“Yes, Boss.”
“Derek, no lights and don’t call anyone. I don’t want a single reporter at that door.”
“Got it, Boss.”

Laura grabbed her husband by the sleeve and pulled him back into his seat.
“Listen to me carefully, because this is something I know how to do. First pregnancy, contractions every eight minutes, no bleeding, and no pain between them. That means hours, Cavalier. Many hours. We’re not going to show up at that clinic with the lights flashing like I’m bleeding to death.”
“You’re eight and a half months.”
“I’m eight and a half months pregnant and I just had a scare the size of a warehouse. Scares bring on labor. Anyone who’s worked a night shift in the ER knows that. The baby is fine, she moved twenty minutes ago, and she’s been kicking me since the waltz.”
Ethan looked at her for a long moment.
“And you?”
“I’m barefoot, my dress is torn, and I have your mother’s blood on my sleeve. But I’m whole.”
She saw him lower his head. She also saw something move beneath his two-day-old beard, and this time she didn’t let it pass: she put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled him closer until his forehead rested against her temple.
“Cry if you need to.”
“I can’t.”
“Fine. Then breathe, because if you pass out too, Derek is going to have to deliver this baby, and that man hasn’t carried anything smaller than a rifle.”
Up front, Derek lifted his eyes to the rearview mirror for a second, then lowered them again.
And Ethan let the air out through his nose, once, short. It wasn’t a laugh. But it was the first thing that had come out of his body since the warehouse, and it meant more to Laura than anything else she could have gotten out of him that night.

They entered Manhattan by the usual street.
Laura counted again. Five minutes.
Five. Good. We’re getting there.
And this one she felt coming in time, so she shifted onto her side, rested her forehead against the cold glass, and let herself ride it out without fighting it, breathing the way she taught other women to breathe when she was still the one standing with the chart in her hand.
Ethan placed his open hand against her lower back and left it there without pressing. He didn’t ask anything. He didn’t speak. He simply left it there.
When the contraction ended, Laura stayed with her forehead against the glass for a moment, watching the city pass by.
And then she felt warmth running down her legs.
She went still. Slowly, she lowered her hand to the skirt of the dress, touched it, and looked at her wet fingers in the light of a traffic signal.
Fuck. This girl takes after the Cavaliers: she arrives whenever she damn well pleases and without warning.
She lifted her head.
Her husband was looking at her. Derek was too, through the mirror.
“Cavalier.”
“Tell me.”
“My water broke.”