Four hours of one hand clamped around the steering wheel and the other pressed against her chest. Four hours of prayers she did not believe in but repeated anyway, because when your daughter is thirty-two years old and in labor six weeks early with triplets, faith becomes less about religion and more about bargaining.
Please let her live.
Please let the babies live.
Please let me be late for nothing more than a grandmother’s first kiss on three tiny foreheads.
She knew the second she stepped through the maternity ward doors that she was late for something else.
A chaplain stood near the nurses’ station, his hands folded too neatly. Beside him, a nurse with swollen eyes held a clipboard to her chest like a shield. Down the hall, a baby cried. Then another. Then, impossibly, a third.
The chaplain took one step forward.
Dorothy stopped walking.
“No,” she said.
It came out as a breath, barely a word. But the chaplain heard it. So did the nurse. So did Dorothy herself, and she knew from the sound of it that part of her already understood.
“I’m Mrs. Brennan,” she said. “My daughter is Colleen Ashford. She was brought in tonight. She’s having triplets.”
The nurse’s face crumpled.