At thirty-eight weeks, Wendy’s doctor recommended a scheduled C-section. The gestational diabetes had complicated timing, and Paige’s measurements suggested waiting for spontaneous labor might not be wise. Wendy nodded during the explanation like she was fine. Then she got into the car afterward, closed the passenger door, and stared out the windshield while Mitchell started the engine and waited.
“I’m scared,” she whispered finally.
Mitchell unbuckled, leaned across the console, and kissed her forehead. “Of course you are. You still get to do it scared.”
She did.
The morning of the surgery, the hospital lights were too bright and the air too cold and everything smelled like antiseptic and old panic. Nurses moved efficiently around her. Mitchell wore blue scrubs over his clothes and tried to look steady enough for both of them. Wendy signed forms with hands that did not feel entirely hers. Then there was the operating room, the drape, the pressure that was not pain until suddenly it was too close to pain to define, the strange knowledge of being cut open while still awake enough to know it was happening.
Then there was a cry.
A real cry. Sharp, indignant, furious at the indignity of air.
Paige.
A nurse lifted her over the drape for one impossible second, and Wendy saw a tiny pink-red face scrunched with outrage, a damp swirl of dark hair, a fist already opening. Mitchell made a sound Wendy had never heard from him before, something between a laugh and a sob. When the nurse finally laid Paige against Wendy’s chest, warm and furious and alive, Wendy burst into tears so hard her whole body shook against the operating table.
“We did it,” Mitchell whispered, forehead pressed to hers.
For that one moment everything else disappeared. The room. The surgery. The months of blood sugar readings and swallowed insults and family politics and fear. All of it vanished under the weight of seven pounds and some ounces of new life.
Then the anesthesia began to fade.