Her photographs. The thermo mix her mother had bought her as a wedding gift. Knickknacks, mugs she’d bought as souvenirs on the odd trip. Things that made a house a home.

“Want me to come with you?”

Cora let out a breath. “Yes, please.”

A home. That was hers.

Maybe a dog.

* * *

You weren’t supposed to run in hospitals. Everyone knew that.

There were fragile, old people and sick, young people and every mix of those two things walking the hallways. You were more than likely to fall over a basket of bed sheets or slip on a recently mopped floor or take out a co-worker—one who really didn’t deserve it. They had information sessions about how even if there was an emergency, you did not run.

Instead, everybody speed-walked.

And after years of practice, Frazer, like most of the staff, could move through hospital corridors almost as fast as if she ran.

Which was exactly what Frazer was doing now.

She weaved between some nurses and doctors chatting in a hallway, none of whom batted an eyelash, reading her body language and stepping forward or back to make room. They didn’t even miss a beat of their discussion. Rounding a corner widely to avoid collisions, Frazer hopped in a circle to wheel around a sheet basket. Someone yanked a medicine trolley out of her way, and she waved her thanks.

She was slightly red-faced yet not breathing hard when she burst through the double doors to the maternity ward, thanks to all her excessive, angry swimming. She was burning so many calories lately that all she did these days was eat just to keep up.

All the swimming did nothing to burn away her anger at Cora, though.

“Frazer! Where’s the fire?”

Her favourite nurse, Gavin, was raising his eyebrows at her like he was concerned for her sanity. She flashed him a grin.

“I was paged for an emergency.”

His eyebrows raised even higher. “There isn’t any emergency.”

Okay. Maybe it hadn’t been an emergency. “Well, okay, I was paged for a birth.”

“Okay, midwife of ten years, since when does a normal birth constitute an emergency?”

Sagging dramatically across the nurses’ station desk, Frazer pouted up at him. “It’s my first patient from the program…”

Gavin’s eyes lit up. “Oh! You mean—”

“Jack in room three.”

Gavin looked up with a scrunched expression at the bed list on the white board.

“We don’t have a Jack, we have—”

“Jack. We have Jack in room three.” Frazer straightened so she looked less like a sulking fifteen-year-old. “Jack is transgender.”

“Oh.” Gavin’s face went from confused to more confused to relaxed. “Oh! I get it now. Okay.” He walked around the desk and swiped out the name written on the board, the dead name that legalities would have forced Jack to check in with, and replaced it with Jack. “I didn’t know.”