I also signed her up for a free trial of every dating website I could find, using her pictures from Instagram （she was so pretty, goddamn it）， and clicked the heart button on the most egregious men out there. Been sober for two days! crowed George in Falmouth. Sixty-eight years old, temporarily living with mother, not averse to having kids, said Myron in Boston. Love Jesus, football and my five kids, said Beau. Hunting enthusiast. Enjoy eating my kills. Come, now. Melissa and Beau would be a match made in heaven. It was deeply satisfying.
But no matter what petty things I did for revenge, I couldn’t get past the fact that until the night before our son’s graduation, I had loved my husband, and somewhere along the line, he had stopped loving me.
CHAPTER 6
Lillie
You’re doing great, Molly,” I murmured in the darkened birthing suite at the hospital. My client was lying in the birthing pool, floating on her back, eyes closed, her glorious stomach rolling with the contraction. She didn’t answer, completely focused inward on the power of her body, humming as her muscles clenched. “Relax and breathe, nice and slow.” Another low hum, and the contraction ended. “You look utterly gorgeous,” I said honestly. “You’re doing this so well.”
She reached up and grabbed my hand, and I stroked her hair back from her head. Molly was single, having gone the sperm donor route at the age of thirty, not wanting to wait for a decline in fertility to have her first baby. Smart. Funny, to think that when she first told me that, I’d been a smug married, imagining how much harder she’d have it. Now, I sort of envied her. I would’ve saved myself a lot of money and heartache if I’d divorced Brad immediately after Dylan was born. Sure, he’d been a good enough dad, but these days, I wasn’t in the mood to credit him with anything.
Molly’s sister was en route, but traffic was wretched today, a Friday. Hopefully, she’d make it in time to see her niece being born. If not, well, nature didn’t take well to direction, and babies waited for no one. Last week, a woman had given birth in the hospital parking lot. Sadly, I had not been the midwife on duty that day. Precipitous births could be wicked exciting.
The door opened, and the lights flickered on. Molly put her hand over her eyes.
“Lights off, please!” I snapped.
“Fine, fine.” The lights went out again, and the dreaded Dr. Schneider poked her head in. “Still laboring? Damn. I thought she’d be done now. Is she pushing yet?” She had a loud voice that could be heard all the way to the nurses’ station.
“She’s progressing beautifully, Doctor,” I said calmly.
“Are you in a lot of pain, poor baby?” she called over to Molly. I gritted my teeth. Dr. Schneider did not understand what it meant to empower the mother. “Poor maternal effort?” she said, lowering her voice so it could only be heard in half the hallway.
“The exact opposite,” I said, keeping my tone firm and mild, though my eye twitched. “Amazing maternal effort.”
“She’s been here for four hours,” the doctor said, as if that was a problem. “Did you break her water to get things moving along? How about a little Pitocin?”
Carline Schneider, MD, obstetrician and gynecologist, was a nemesis to CNMs everywhere. She was the kind of doctor who would order Pitocin to hurry things up or use the vacuum so she could be home by dinnertime. The kind who’d leave a patient when her shift ended, passing her off to someone else, rather than stay the extra half hour till the baby was born. Childless by choice, with the highest percentage of medical interventions at a place that prided itself on natural childbirth and healthy babies and mothers. How she had kept her job here was a mystery.
All the nurses and midwives （and other doctors, for that matter） hated her. She was the worst of the old-school obstetricians, lover of cesareans, the only one who still used forceps and used terms like “failure to progress” and “inhospitable womb” in front of patients. In her sixties, full of impatience for “you witches,” completely dismissing the fact that every midwife at Hyannis Hospital had a bachelor’s of science in nursing, neonatal intensive care nursing certification, master’s in nursing with a specialization in midwifery, and certification as a nurse-midwife.
Every other doctor at the hospital, most especially Wanda, viewed CNMs as equals, respected our opinions and essentially turned labor over to us and the L&D nurses. They only came in to check on difficult labors or when medical intervention was absolutely necessary, or just because they had a special bond with the patient. Otherwise, they let us do our jobs. In addition to helping my own patients deliver here, I did a weekly twelve-hour shift at the hospital （or two, when money was tight）。