I want to laugh at that. Or scream. Maybe both. Instead, I choke on the pain, my breath coming in short, uneven bursts as I try to do what he’s telling me. It feels impossible, like my body is doing something it shouldn’t be able to do, to survive.
“I can’t—” The words fall apart as the contraction peaks. “I can’t do this?—”
“You are doing it,” he says immediately. Not louder, not harsher, but unyielding in a way that doesn’t give me room to argue. “Stay with me, Sage.”
My name in his mouth shouldn’t matter right now.
It does anyway.
I shake my head, tears slipping out of the corners of my eyes as the pain crests, holds, stretches me to the edge of something I don’t know how to come back from. My body is shaking, every muscle pulled tight, every instinct screaming at me to get away from this, to stop it somehow.
“Cervix?” he asks the nurse.
“Completely dilated.”
“Listen to me.” Ronan’s already looking at me, locked in, like everything else in the room has faded out. “On the next contraction, you’re going to push. Not before. You wait for it, then ride that wave.”
I nod, barely, because it’s all I can manage. Ride that wave. But contractions are not waves. They aren’t gentle things, lapping at some inner beach.
Contractions are body-altering tsunamis. There’s nothing to do but hope you survive.
The pressure is already building again. Too fast. Too soon. “Oh God—” The words break as my body tightens, the next tsunami rising hard and unforgiving.
“Now,” he says.
I push.
Pain explodes through me, white-hot and overwhelming, tearing a scream out of my throat as everything in me strains, stretches, gives. It feels like I’m splitting in half, like there’s no way through this, no way out the other side.
I only hope my kids survive.
“Again,” Ronan says, steady as ever. “That’s it. Don’t stop.”
I don’t know how not to stop. I don’t know how to keep going. But his voice is there, constant, unwavering, and I latch onto it because I don’t have anything else.
Leigh was going to be here for this. But I’m weeks early, so we hadn’t expected this. When her cousin called to say she’d been in a car accident and needed her, I told her to go.
I thought I had time. I was wrong.
Push again, sob. Shake as the pressure builds to something unbearable, something that makes me feel like I might actually break under it. It’s a short to-do list, but it’s all I’ve got.
“Good job, Sage,” he says, and there’s something in the words that lands deeper than it should. “You’re right there.”
Right there. Like this is something with a finish line.
“Head’s crowning.”
The words barely register before the pain spikes higher than anything before it. I cry out, my grip slipping as my body arches, pushing without waiting for permission this time because I can’t do anything else.
And then something shifts. A release.
Too many seconds later, a cry cuts through the room, thin and sharp and impossibly real.
My heart lurches.
“Baby one,” someone says.
Alive. My baby is alive.
