It didn’t move.
I pushed harder. Threw my shoulder into it. Beat my fist against it until my hand throbbed. The door was locked and my baby was on the other side and the silence was absolute and I could not get in.
I pressed my face to the window.
The room was empty. Clean white sheets on the bed. Bassinet in the corner, neatly made.
No figure. No baby. No sign that anyone had ever been there at all.
Just an empty room, scrubbed clean, as if she’d never existed.
I came awake with a gasp that felt like surfacing from deep water.
Our bedroom. Gray light through the glass wall. The ceiling fan turning above us, steady and slow. Jack’s arm across my waist, his breathing deep and even against the back of my neck.
I pressed my hand to my chest and felt my heart slamming against my ribs. The sheets were damp under me. Sweat, not the cold linoleum of a hospital floor. And my hands were shaking.
Actually shaking, a fine tremor I couldn’t control.
Not real. Not real. None of it was real.
My hand went to my stomach. Flat. Warm. Still there. Still mine.
I lay very still and concentrated on breathing. In through my nose, slow. Out through my mouth, slower. The way you coached someone through shock. The way I’d coached Loretta Washington six hours ago, though she’d had real grief and I only had the phantom kind. The kind your brain manufactured from fear and hormones and a long day spent with the dead.
A mother knows.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Loretta had known something was wrong before we’d said a word. Had felt it, she said. In her chest. In the place where her son had always lived.
I wasn’t a mother yet. But I’d felt it in the dream, that annihilating terror, that willingness to break down doors and shatter bone and crawl on bleeding hands if it meant getting to her in time. And the worst part wasn’t the fear. The worst part was the helplessness. The hallway that wouldn’t end. The door that wouldn’t open. All of my training, all of my strength, all of my stubborn, relentless will…and none of it had been enough.
It was just a dream.
I pressed my palm harder against my stomach. Jack shifted behind me, murmured something into my hair, settled deeper into sleep.
I didn’t go back to sleep. I lay there in the gray half light with my hand on my stomach and my eyes wide open, listening to Jack breathe, listening to the fan, listening for a sound that wasn’t there, a small, thin cry from down the hall, from a room that didn’t exist yet, from a daughter I hadn’t met.
The house was quiet. Everything was fine.
Jack stirred behind me, his arm tightening, pulling me closer.
“You’re thinking too loud,” he murmured against my hair.
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“Liar.” He kissed the back of my neck, lazy and warm. “How long have you been awake?”
Too long. “A few minutes.”
His hand spread across my stomach, casual, possessive—and my breath caught. He couldn’t know. It was just the way he held me, the way he always held me, one arm around my waist, hand resting wherever it landed. But after the dream, the weight of his palm against that small, flat space felt like the only thing keeping me anchored to the real world.
I laced my fingers through his and held on.
“Hey.” His voice changed—still rough with sleep but alert now, reading me the way he always could. “You okay?”
“Fine. Just didn’t sleep great.”
He was quiet for a beat. I could feel him deciding whether to push. “Bad dream?”
