My palms slipped on tile. My knees dragged. I reached the entry table in fragments, vision dimming and sharpening in cruel rhythm with the contractions. My bag had toppled sideways; lipstick, receipts, and hand lotion spilled across the hardwood. I snatched my phone with shaking fingers and hit Ethan’s number.
He answered on the first ring.
“Amelia.”
Just my name. But the steadiness of it nearly undid me.
“I’m at my parents’ house,” I cried. “I think—Ethan, I think the baby’s coming.”
Silence, but only for the length of one controlled breath.
“How far apart?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know—my water broke.”
“Listen to me.” His voice changed, flattening into command, the tone I had only heard twice before when something serious happened. “Are you bleeding?”
“A little. I don’t know. It hurts.”
“Can you put me on speaker?”
My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped the phone, but I managed it.
Ethan’s voice filled the polished hallway. “Mr. Bennett. Mrs. Bennett. This is Ethan. Call emergency services now. Then unlock the back gate and clear the yard.”
My mother gave a disbelieving laugh. “The yard?”
“Do it,” he said.
Something in his tone startled all of us into stillness.
My father found his voice first. “Don’t you speak to us like—”
“Your daughter is in premature labor on your floor,” Ethan said, each word cut from ice. “You can argue with me later. Right now you will do exactly as I say.”
Another contraction ripped through me. I screamed.
My father swore and moved at last, striding toward the kitchen windows that looked out over the lawn. My mother hovered uselessly beside me, arms half-lifted, as though uncertain whether touching me would wrinkle her blouse.
“Amelia,” Ethan said. “Stay with me.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know. You’re doing exactly what you need to do. Hear me?”
I pressed my forehead to the floor and nodded, then realized he couldn’t see. “Yes.”
“I have a team en route.”
From London? I almost asked. It made no sense. Time zones, airports, distance—none of it fit. But Ethan did not say impossible things unless he had already solved them.
Somewhere beyond the walls, thunder rolled.
Or maybe not thunder.
At first it was faint, a low rhythmic tremor threaded through the air. My mother turned toward the backyard windows, frowning. My father, now at the door, froze with one hand on the handle.
The sound grew louder.
Deeper.
A chopping roar that made the glass shiver in its frame.