Page 246 of Twins for Three Bad Boys

People say things as we pass. Good luck. Is she okay? Someone get her water. But it all feels far away, muffled by the rushing panic in my ears and the surrealness of the moment.

This morning I was selling painted fox toys.

Now I’m in labor.

With twins.

At the market.

Because, apparently, my unborn children believe in dramatic timing.

The truck appears in front of us like salvation.

Wayne gets the back door open. Fletcher helps me in, gentle but firm. Rex shoves my bag into the footwell. Somewhere in the scramble, Millie appears at the window, wild-eyed and tearful and grinning like she’s out of her mind.

“You call me,” she says, pointing at all three of them and then at me, “the second there are babies.”

“I will,” I promise.

Then Wayne’s in the driver’s seat, Rex is beside me in the back, Fletcher in the front, and we’re moving.

The trip to the hospital is a blur, with Wayne muttering low curses at the traffic like red lights were invented to personally inconvenience him.

Rex holds my hand the whole time.

Fletcher twists around in his seat every few seconds to look at me, eyes scanning my face, my stomach, my breathing, as if he can somehow build a plan out of observation alone.

Wayne drives as fast as a man trying not to break the speed limit by force of will alone.

“I’m fine,” I say at one point, though I’m panting and sweating and deeply not fine.

Three voices answer at once.

“Bullshit.”

“Darlin’.”

“No.”

Despite everything, I laugh.

Then another contraction hits, and I’m not laughing anymore.

The hospital swallows us whole after that.

Doors. Bright lights. Questions. A wheelchair produced from nowhere despite my insistence that I can still walk. Wayne answering paperwork before I even realize anyone asked his name. Fletcher holding my bag and my jacket and, somehow, my dignity while a nurse clips a bracelet onto my wrist. Rex making a joke to one of the intake nurses that is so outrageous she nearly drops the chart, and then smiles at me apologetically when it actually works and makes me laugh.

And through all of it, the fear is still there, huge and cold and real.

But there’s more too.

Hands.

Voices.

Presence.

I’m never alone for even a second.