A nurse rose from the chair beside me so quickly her shoes squeaked.
“Dr. Grant?”
It was Maya, one of the labor nurses. Her usually neat bun was coming loose, and there were shadows beneath her eyes as if she had not slept all night.
I tried to speak.
Nothing came out.
Maya leaned closer. “Don’t force it. You were intubated for surgery.”
Surgery.
The word moved slowly through my mind.
There were gaps where memories should have been.
The flatline alarm. Elena’s voice. Cameron’s face.
Then one thought punched through the fog so violently my fingers clenched around the blanket.
My baby.
Maya saw the question before I could form it.
“He’s alive,” she said quickly. “He’s in the neonatal observation unit, but he’s stable. Ten pounds, four ounces. Strong lungs. A little bruised from the delivery, but he’s doing well.”
I closed my eyes.
The relief was so immense it hurt.
Tears slid down the sides of my face into my hair.
Maya pressed a tissue into my hand and, for a moment, said nothing. That silence was kinder than any reassurance.
When I opened my eyes again, I forced the words through the rawness in my throat.
“What happened?”
Maya looked toward the door.
It was only a glance, but I caught it.
Doctors learn to hear what people do not say. We learn to see hesitation, swallowed words, careful posture. Maya was not merely tired.
She was frightened.
“Dr. Reyes performed an emergency procedure,” she said. “You lost a lot of blood. There was uterine atony, tearing, and…” She stopped, choosing her words carefully. “There were complications from the length and difficulty of the delivery.”
My hand drifted to my abdomen.
There was pain there, but not the clean surgical pain of a planned cesarean. It was deeper. A battlefield ache.
