At 2:07 in the morning, I reached across our bed and discovered my husband's side was cold.

The fluorescent lights in the ceiling of St. Anthony’s Hospital were so bright they made my retinas burn.

Every breath felt like swallowing shards of glass.

"Breathe, Maya. Don't hold it. Blow it out through your lips like you’re blowing out a candle," Clara’s voice was right next to my ear. Her cool, dry hand was gripping mine so tightly my wedding rings were biting into my flesh. "You’re doing it. You’re doing it, sweetie."

"I can’t," I wept, thrashing against the thin hospital sheets. "Clara, it hurts too much. It feels like my hips are splitting in half."

"You’re seven centimeters," the labor and delivery nurse, a calm, middle-aged woman named Brenda, said from the foot of my bed. She was checking the monitor screen that stood beside me, its green lines climbing into jagged, terrifying mountains of digital data. "Baby’s heart rate is holding steady at one hundred and forty. He’s a tough little fighter, Maya. But we need you to keep your oxygen up. Put the mask on."

I grabbed the plastic oxygen mask, pressing it against my face. The cold, sterile air rushed into my lungs.

My mother was sitting in the vinyl armchair in the corner of the room, her rosary beads clicking rapidly through her fingers, her face pale with terror.

When my water had broken in the kitchen, it hadn't been a gentle trickle like in the movies. It had been an explosion of fluid, slick and sudden. My feet had slipped on the kitchen tile, my knees buckling, my hip slamming hard against the floor as I went down. For five horrifying minutes, I had lain there alone on the kitchen floor, surrounded by amniotic fluid, unable to get up, weeping into the cabinets, convinced I had killed my son before he took his first breath.

I had dragged myself on my elbows across the floor to the living room coffee table to reach my cell phone.

I didn't call Jake. Even in that moment of absolute, blinding terror, my subconscious already knew: *Jake is gone. Jake will not save you. You are on your own.*

I had called Clara.

Now, another contraction seized me. It wasn't a wave; it was an avalanche. It hit with such savage, tearing intensity that a low, guttural scream ripped from my throat into the plastic oxygen mask. My entire body arched off the mattress.

"Hold on to me!" Clara leaned over the bed, pressing her forehead against mine. "Look at me, Maya! Look at my eyes! Theo is coming! You’re bringing him into the world! Don't you worry about anything else! Just look at me!"

"Where is he?" I sobbed against her forehead, the tears running into my ears, into my hair. "Why isn't he here? Why didn't he want us?"

Clara’s jaw tightened, her eyes flashing with a deep, murderous protectiveness. "He doesn't matter right now. He is nothing. You are everything this baby needs. You hear me? You are his mother, his protector, his whole damn universe. Push him out, Maya. Push him out for you."

Dr. Feldman burst through the double doors of room 412, wearing surgical scrubs, pulling blue latex gloves over her hands with a loud snap.

"All right, Maya," Feldman’s voice was brisk, steady, the voice of a captain taking the helm of a ship in a Category 5 hurricane. "Let’s see where we are. Brenda, get the stirrups up."

Brenda moved with lightning efficiency. Feldman sat on the rolling stool between my knees, reached in, and took a breath.

"Nine and a half centimeters," Dr. Feldman said, looking up over her mask with sharp, focused eyes. "The cervix is fully effaced. Maya, the baby’s head is right there. On the next contraction, you don't breathe through it. On the next contraction, you push."

"No, I’m not ready," I cried, shaking my head violently back and forth across the flat hospital pillow. "I’m not ready, I’m too tired, I haven't slept in three days—"

"You are ready," Clara yelled, her voice breaking with fierce, unyielding sisterly love. "You are stronger than any man who ever walked the earth! Push this baby out, Maya! Bring Theo home!"

The monitor let out a high-pitched beep.

The vise closed around my midsection again. The pain was beyond anything human, beyond language, beyond memory. It was an ancient, elemental force demanding everything I had ever been and everything I would ever be.