"No." She put her hand on the baby, who was low now, heavy, dropped into her pelvis the way the books said she would be, like a stone settling into a riverbed. "I just feel like I'm finally standing on something solid."
When they went back in, Grant was alone at the table. Doug Pruett was in the hall on his phone. Grant had taken off his tie and it lay curled beside his legal pad like something shed.
"I'll sign whatever," he said. "The quitclaim. The stipulation. Whatever you want. I don't want any part of the house." He looked at Nora, really looked, for the first time all afternoon. "I don't want anything. I want to see her. When she's born. That's all I want. Please don't take that."
She had thought, for weeks, about what she would say if he asked her that. She'd rehearsed cold things. Cruel things. In the end she said only what was true.
"I won't keep her from you," Nora said. "She gets to have a father. But you're going to earn every single hour of it, Grant. Every one. On a schedule, in writing, through a court. Because I'm never going to take your word for anything again."
He nodded. He put his face in his hands. And she found, to her own surprise, that she felt nothing at all watching him cry—not triumph, not pity—only a kind of tiredness, and under it, steady as a heartbeat on a monitor, relief.
* * *
Her water broke at 2:40 in the morning on the twentieth of October, in the kitchen, where she had gone for a glass of milk and was standing in front of the open refrigerator in the cold white light, and the first thing Nora thought, absurdly, was: at least it isn't lemonade.
She called her father first. He picked up on the first ring, wide awake, as if he'd been sitting by the phone for six weeks, which—she found out later—he more or less had. "On my way," Frank said, and hung up, and was in her driveway in seven minutes with the hospital bag she'd packed in September and left at his place, just in case, and a thermos of coffee, and his shoes on the wrong feet.
She called Priya second. Priya said, "I'm getting in the car," and then, "Wait, I'm in Oakland," and then, "I'm getting in the car anyway, it's eighty-seven miles, I'll be there before the epidural," and she was, by forty minutes, in sweatpants and her deposition blazer, which she had apparently grabbed in the dark.
She did not call Grant. Marcus had drafted, and the court had entered, a temporary order: Grant was to be notified when the baby was born, not when labor began. Nora had asked for that. She'd thought about it for a long time and decided that she would not spend one minute of her daughter's arrival managing a man's feelings.
Bev was on shift. Nora didn't know if that was luck or if the universe occasionally offered small, specific kindnesses to balance out the large general ones, but she was there at the nurses' station at Sutter with her reading glasses on their beaded chain, and when she saw Nora come in on Frank's arm she put down her pen and said, "Well, look who decided to wait for me."
It was a long labor. Fourteen hours. Nora had read the books, all of them, and the books had used words like "waves" and "surges," and they were wrong; it was not a wave, it was a vise, it was a fist closing around the bottom of her body and twisting. She swore at the anesthesiologist, and then apologized, and then swore at him again. Priya held one hand and Frank held the other and at some point in the afternoon, between contractions, Frank started telling her about the boat—not about anything in particular, just about the boat, about the way you steam-bend oak for the ribs, about how the wood resists and resists and then gives, all at once, and takes the shape you've been asking it to take—and she held onto his voice like a rope.