around her stomach, breathing the way the nurse had taught her, but the rhythm collapsed. In for four, out for six. In for four. Out for six. The pain did not care about counting.
When it loosened, she crawled toward the living room. There was an old landline on the side table, mostly decorative, left over from before Adrian decided it made the room look cluttered. Nora remembered seeing the cord behind the table. She reached for the receiver.
No dial tone.
She pulled the table back and found the cord coiled neatly on the floor, unplugged.
Of course.
Her breathing turned ragged. She looked toward the front window. The curtains were half closed, the glass streaked with rain. The neighboring houses were blurred shapes. The street was quiet; most people were at work. Her parents were two states away visiting her older brother. Her closest friend had moved to Seattle six months earlier. She had built a life around Adrian, and now that life had become a locked room.
Another contraction came.
This one was different.
It pushed downward with a force that made Nora cry out so loudly her throat burned. She gripped the rug, her fingers twisting in the fibers. Something warm spread beneath her.
Her water had broken.
Fear took on a shape then. Not a vague dread, but a clean, sharp knowledge. The babies could come here. On this floor. Without a doctor. Without monitors. Without anyone to help if one of them could not breathe.
Nora pressed both hands to her belly.
“Please,” she whispered. “Stay with me.”
There was the faintest flutter beneath her palm.
Then stillness.
She was trying to pull herself toward the front door when a knock sounded.
At first she thought it belonged inside her head. Then it came again, harder.
“Nora?”
She froze.
A man’s voice, muffled by rain and wood.
“Nora, it’s Daniel from next door. I heard screaming. Are you all right?”
Daniel Mercer. The widower with the gray dog and the careful rose bushes. Nora had exchanged polite greetings with him over the fence. Once he had brought over misdelivered mail. Another time he had helped her lift a nursery dresser from the porch when Adrian was late.
She tried to answer.
Pain stole the word.
What came out was a cry.
The doorknob rattled.
“Nora, are you alone?”
She dragged in air. “Labor. Twins. Locked.”
Silence.
Then Daniel’s voice changed. It lost its neighborly hesitation and became firm.
“Move away from the door if you can. I’m calling 911.”
Nora tried. She crawled back two feet, then another. The next minutes came apart into noise. Daniel shouting through the door. Rain. A siren far away and then closer. A heavy impact at the back of the house. Someone calling her name from the kitchen.
Daniel appeared first, soaked through, his white hair plastered to his forehead. Behind him came two paramedics and a police officer. Nora had never been so grateful to see strangers.
“I’m here,” Daniel said, dropping to his knees a careful distance away. “You’re not alone anymore.”
A paramedic named Elise knelt beside Nora and took her pulse. Another moved with swift calm, opening equipment cases, speaking into a radio.
“How far apart are the contractions?” Elise asked.
“I don’t know,”
