She said wait. So he did.

Synopsis

When I was nine months pregnant, Charles Summers was still listening to Nadine Rivers teach him how to love me. She told him a husband shouldn't spoil his wife too much if he wanted a marriage to last. So Charles skipped seven out of my ten prenatal appointments. She told him married couples needed to keep some distance from each other. So when I started suffering from insomnia during the final months of my pregnancy, he moved into the guest room. Every time I felt hurt, Charles would pull me into his arms. He said, "Nadine is an outsider. She can see things more objectively than we can. Listen to her. She won't steer us wrong." Then, at three in the morning, my water broke. I shook Charles awake. "My water broke. Take me to the hospital." He had barely sat up when his phone rang. Nadine had tagged him in their group chat. Nadine: [Don't let her scare you. It takes a while with the first baby. [If you go now, you'll just be sitting around at the hospital anyway.] Then she sent a labor monitoring chart to the group. Nadine: [Note the time her water broke. If the contractions aren't coming less than five minutes apart, she doesn't need to leave yet.] Another contraction seized my abdomen. The pain was so intense I couldn't even speak. But Charles simply tucked the blanket around me. "You haven't reached the threshold on the chart yet. Relax. Don't scare yourself." But the blood between my legs kept flowing. And then the baby inside me stopped moving.