Then the baby kicked, hard, right under my ribs, and I remembered everything. I was thirty-four weeks pregnant. I was alone. And the sirens weren’t going past my house.
They had stopped outside it.
I rolled out of bed the way you have to when you’re that pregnant. Onto my side first, then pushing up with both arms, then sitting on the edge of the mattress for a second while the room tilted. My back was screaming. My ankles were still swollen from the day before, puffy and tight, like somebody had stuffed them with wet sand.
Somebody pounded on my front door.
Not a knock. A pound. Three times, hard enough to rattle the little glass window beside it.
My heart dropped straight into my stomach.
I pulled on my robe. It didn’t close anymore over my belly, so I just held it shut with one hand. I walked down the hallway in my bare feet, past the room that was supposed to be a nursery and was still full of unopened boxes, past the stack of mail on the hall table that I hadn’t been brave enough to open.
