How many babies had she delivered over the years? Hundreds? A thousand? Ten thousand? Hannah wished she’d kept track. For the most part they blurred together, a sped-up montage of life in all its messy glory; and also, occasionally, the most profound of sorrows. The sorrows, she tended to remember in excruciating detail. They came infrequently, but when they did, it was impossible to forget them. She was no stranger to providing gynecologic care for her friends and acquaintances. It was a given in this field; the women in your social circles sought you out. But all of them—all these people in San Diego—knew the fully formed adult Hannah. They didn’t know the misplaced optimism with which she’d navigated medical school or the naive doormat she’d been in college or the timid, awkward Hannah of her high school days.

Georgia knew at least one of those versions, but any resurrected memory of their old lives appeared to be the furthest thing from her mind at the moment. As Hannah expected, she’d declined an epidural and now paced around the sun-drenched birthing room, periodically stopping with her hands on her knees to breathe through a contraction. She radiated strength: hair bundled into a red knot atop her head, muscular limbs gleaming with sweat, a black mask with a see-through panel in the front. When the pains came, she gritted her teeth and hissed through them, which, in a form of unconscious solidarity, Jonah had begun doing as well. The two of them paced and gritted and hissed, and in any reasonable universe they would have looked ridiculous, but in this one, somehow, they were fierce and beautiful.

The first stage of labor drew to a close. Fittingly, the sun had begun to set, the light from the west-facing window dimming and growing rosier as the sky cycled through its most spectacular palettes: clear bright blue to molten orange to a soft, velvety indigo stretching above a silvery sliver of sea. Jonah busied himself setting up two iPads on tripods, as the nurse, Laura, helped Georgia into the bed. Hannah reached a hand to flick on the overhead lights, but Jonah, his black eyes glimmering, stopped her. “She doesn’t want any bright lights,” he said. “No overhead fluorescents, okay?”

Hannah switched on a retractable OR-type light hitched to the ceiling by a mechanical swing-arm, aiming it at Georgia’s open legs. Georgia waited for her contraction to end—hiss, hiss, hiss—and aimed a barb back at Hannah.

“Dude. Do not light up my beav. I don’t wanna blind the baby.”