“Don’t look at him,” Drew said, his voice dropping back into a steady, protective rumble as he backed out of the driveway. “Keep your eyes forward, Han. We’re going to Mom and Dad’s.”
The drive from Murfreesboro to my parents’ small farm outside Franklin usually took forty-five minutes. On that Saturday afternoon, it felt like an expedition across a continent.
Every expansion joint on Interstate 840 sent a jolt of pain through my lower spine, making me bite the inside of my lip until I tasted iron. Clara slept peacefully, lulled by the low rumble of Drew’s diesel engine, but my body was rapidly falling apart. The adrenaline that had carried me across Eric’s living room floor was draining away, leaving behind a cold, nauseating fever that made my teeth chatter despite the eighty-degree heat outside.
Drew didn’t turn on the radio. He kept his left hand on the wheel and his right hand on the console, his thumb tapping an erratic, furious rhythm against the plastic.
“I called Mom from the driveway,” Drew said after ten minutes of silence. “She’s got the downstairs guest room ready. Clean sheets, fresh pillows, three heating pads, and she sent Dad to the pharmacy to get the good witch hazel pads and disposable ice packs.”
“Did you tell her about the room?” I asked, my voice barely audible over the air vents.
Drew glanced at me, his jaw tightening again. “I told her Eric had you on the floor. I didn’t tell her about the dryer running by your head. If I told her that, Mom would have driven into town with Dad’s twelve-gauge, and we don’t need our mother doing twenty-to-life for voluntary manslaughter.”
A broken, wet laugh escaped my chest, turning immediately into a wince as my stitches pulled.
When Drew pulled into the gravel drive of my parents’ property, my mother was already standing on the wide wraparound porch. Elaine Miller was sixty-two years old, five-foot-three, with silver-streaked brown hair tied back in a bandana and the spine of a railroad spike. She didn’t wait for the truck to stop rolling before she was down the wooden steps.
She opened the passenger door herself.
When she saw me—sweat-soaked, gray-faced, clutching a folded towel against my lower stomach—her eyes widened in shock, but she didn’t gasp, and she didn’t panic. Elaine Miller was an emergency room nurse who had spent thirty years triaging gunshot wounds and tractor rollovers at Vanderbilt.
“All right, baby,” Mom said, her voice dropping into the clinical, soothing register she had used on me since I was five years old. “Don’t try to stand on your own. Drew, get her under the arms. I’ve got her legs.”
Between the two of them, they lifted me from the truck cab without letting my feet touch the gravel. They carried me through the front door, bypassing the living room entirely, and straight into the main-floor guest bedroom behind the kitchen.
The bed was a low, firm king mattress dressed in crisp, white cotton that smelled of sunshine and lavender detergent. Drew lowered me down, and as my back settled into the support of three feather pillows, an involuntary groan tore from my chest. For five days, my body had been braced against the hard concrete of the laundry room floor, every muscle locked in a perpetual spasm of defense. Sinking into an actual bed felt so overwhelming that my eyes flooded with tears.
“Clara,” I gasped, reaching blindly toward the door.
“Drew has her in the kitchen, Hannah,” Mom said firmly, pulling off my dirty sneakers and tossing them into the corner. “She’s clean, she’s dry, and Drew is warming an emergency bottle of donor milk from the freezer. Look at me. Look at your mother.”
I forced my eyes open. Mom was peeling back the waistband of my sweatpants, her gloved fingers moving with swift, clinical authority.
She took one look at my incision site and let out a sharp, hissing breath through her teeth.
“Drew!” Mom called toward the doorway, her voice razor-sharp. “Go get Dad’s medical kit from the hall closet. Now.”
“What is it?” I asked, panic flaring through my chest. “Is it torn?”
“The surgical knot at the posterior margin has ripped through the tissue, Hannah,” Mom said, her voice completely steady, though I could see the muscles in her neck corded with fury. “You have active cellulitis starting along the entire left lateral wall. The skin is hot to the touch, and there’s localized purulent drainage. You should have been on IV antibiotics twenty-four hours ago.”
“Eric said it was just bruising,” I whispered, the room beginning to tilt around the edges. “He said having a baby hurts, and I was being dramatic because I have a low pain tolerance.”
