He doesn’t fight her on that even once, and she knows why.
If something happens while he’s gone, then Emma would be here to deal with it alone. If she’s being honest with herself, then sending them on this quest might have more than one motivation, the most important being to keep her daughter from watching her die, or watching her miscarry, should it come to that.
She’s caught between the agony of not knowing and the terror of being separated from them both when the future is so uncertain.
“No! I wanna stay here,” Emma cries.
“Listen to me, you have to go with him.” She waves her daughter over. “I need you to trust me on this, okay? You’ll be back before you know it.”
She’s not convinced, and Addison begins to doubt herself. Shouldn’t she want to spend every moment she can with the people she cares about? Why is she pushing them both away? Then her stomach rolls again, and the need to hear the baby’s heartbeat overcomes her like a tidal wave.
“He doesn’t need me, but if I stay here, I can help. Please don’t make me go,” Emma says softly.
“I do need you,” Wyatt cuts in. “You’re smaller than me. What if we gotta get in some tight places for that machine?”
He’s trying his best with a flimsy reason.
Addison gives Emma a forced smile. “You’re so brave. I know you can do this. You’re safe with Wyatt, and I’ll be right here when you get back. Now go.”
She’s trusting him with the most precious thing she has. Sending her child out into this broken world by his side.
“We won’t be long.” He rushes in to press his lips to her forehead, whispering softly against her skin in a sudden first kiss that feels like a moment stolen from then instead of gifted.
It’s not until they’re gone that fear overtakes her for other reasons. She doesn’t want to be alone. Nausea stirs in her gut, and her hands tremble as she races through a long line of worst-case scenarios. It’ll take less than an hour for them to grab the ultrasound machine and come back. If she were going to die in an hour, she’d already be worse off than she is. An hour is nothing.
She can do this. She has to.
There’s a stack of books on Wyatt’s side table already. One of the corners turned down to mark his spot in what looks like an instruction manual for home births. She props herself up against the headboard, reaching for it to see what’s inside. A series of photos of a baby making its way down the birth canal hits her in the face like a punch. She almost flings it across the room.
“Not a chance I’m reading that right now,” she mumbles.
It’s a stark reminder of how terrified she is to experience labor for the first time. She never felt any contractions with Emma. The C-section drugs kept her pain-free. Never had to handle something the size of a small watermelon leaving her body the old-fashioned way.
How Wyatt can look at any of those books and not be utterly petrified is a mystery. Vincent refused to even talk about it. He told her that he’d be out looking for supplies when she went into labor, and she had better be finished by the time he got back. That was the end of their preparation. If she’s honest, she was glad he had no desire to be there. He hadn’t stayed for Emma’s birth either. Never visited her at the hospital or sat by her bed to hold her hand. Men were never part of the process back in the community. It was the women who all huddled together to help each other through, with the husbands only showing up after the gore and suffering had come to an end.
Wyatt absorbs it all like a sponge, though. He’s unbothered by anything she might find gruesome herself and ready to be a fountain of birthing knowledge when the time comes.
It’s strange, she thinks with a sad shake of her head, how badly Addison wants to include him.
Now, they only have to make it that far.
“Women have babies all the time. Every day,” she tells herself. “Well, they used to.”
Another wave has her wishing for a distraction, but she refuses to do the one thing she has avoided since finding out she’s pregnant.
She will not talk to this baby.
She won’t cradle her belly in her hands and whisper secrets to something she fears she won’t get to keep. Even before these cramps started to pose their own problem, she had been worried about how this would end. The apocalypse is no place for a newborn. She has only been foolish to think they might beat the odds.
Reluctantly, she pokes at her stomach as she breaks one of her most important self-imposed rules. “I promise to stop pretending you’re not in there if you make it through this.”
She has wished more than once that the timing were different, that the situation were different, that the father had been different, that this baby didn’t existyet.Now she’d give anything to take that back.
By the time the sun comes up hours later, long after Wyatt and Emma should have returned already, the pain is gone, the jack hammering of her pulse has calmed, and her body has finally begun to relax…once the steady stream of blood finally stops soaking the sheets.
Chapter 14
The moment things are going well, it all gets flipped on its head in a matter of minutes.
