Page 140 of Everything After

“Okay, well… we’ll find out soon enough if your heart is playing tricks on you,” I suggested.

“My heart never plays tricks. It brought me to you… to us. It knows what it wants and how it feels about what I need in my life,” Alfie muttered, making my heart melt.

“Alright, shut up, hippie. Let’s concentrate on cleaning me up and getting me to the hospital.”

“Can you get Jack on the phone?” I asked as we stepped off the boat in Miami. We climbed into our maintenance guy, Keith’s waiting car to take us to the hospital.

Alfie didn’t reply until I was safely seated, and he’d sat and buckled himself in, and Oscar closed the car door. “Withpleasure,” Alfie said as I watched Oscar jog past the car hood and settle in the passenger seat beside Keith.

I frowned at Alfie’s uncharacteristic response. I thought it was so unlike him, to be so enthusiastic where Jack was concerned, until it dawned on me that my friend was still an ocean away.

“Hey, Jack,” Alfie crooned in an exaggeratedly friendly tone. “You know how you wanted to be in the labor room with Lily? I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible now,” he boasted. Of course we’d never agreed to that in the first place, but it hadn’t stopped Alfie from making his point.

“Speaker phone, please,” I said, and Alfie obliged.

“Lily?” he said. The tone of that one word carried a mixture of alarm, regret and excitement within it.

“Hi, Jack, we’re on our way to the hospital.”

“You’re contracting?” he asked, sounding alarmed.

“No… but my water broke. Scared the life out of us at the time because I was wearing wine-colored pants.”

“Red or white?” he asked.

“If they’d been white, they wouldn’t have scared us, dummy,” I teased, referencing it had been the dark red that had made the discovery ambiguous in the first place.

“Oh, God. That was a crass question, huh?” he remarked, sounding flummoxed. “Right, so no contractions?”

“No, but we need to go to the hospital because they should monitor the baby to make sure everything’s where it should be.”

“Right. But don’t they give you some time to start contracting naturally before they induce the labor? They did that with our third baby, here in the UK.”

“I’m not sure. What’s with all the questions?” I asked.

“I’m looking at flights on an app. There’s one leaving at 5:00 p.m. for New York. If I can get on that, I could be there late evening, your time.”

“No, Jack,” Alfie snapped. A growl tore from his throat. “Dude, I got this. You can fly over tomorrow. You’re not going to be here for the birth.”

“Like I said, I may make that flight,” Jack said again, ignoring Alfie.

“Jack, you should listen to Alfie,” I finally said.

“Then why did you call me, if you don’t want me to come?”

“We’ve shared so much in our lives this far. I mean you called me each time Mya went into labor, right? I just wanted to share in this moment with you,” I surmised.

“I see,” he remarked, sounding disappointed.

“Of course, I’d be delighted to see you, but Alfie’s right, this is our time. I’m not telling my mum either.”

“Jesus, could you imagine your mum with the hospital staff? They’d be scared shitless with her bossy nature,” Jack agreed with a smile in his voice for the first time since I’d said, ‘don’t come’.

“I’ll give you a call from the hospital once I know what’s happening.”

“I’ll be waiting… oh, and Lily?”

“Yeah?”