“Hold your breast,” said Oris. Edie could barely see through the tears. She could taste the runoff from her nose. “Hold your breast and I’ll hold baby. There. Yes. There. Now hold her head. Hold her head! Yes! Keep holding!”

This was a triumph, apparently. Weeping, with Lydia’s head mashed into her chest. Oris made a note on the chart attached to Lydia’s plastic bassinet, then left the room. Nathan found a tissue somewhere and wiped Edie’s face.

“Can I do anything?” he asked, stroking her back.

Edie was afraid that if she moved, even to look up at him or shrug, Lydia would fall off her breast. She whispered, “No.”

Nathan kissed her head again. He picked up the pile on the couch to make space to sit and saw the phone.

“Your sister called.”

“What?”

He showed her: Missed call from Claudia. And below it, a text:

i’m so sorry. i lost my phone.

That’s it? I’m sorry?

“Should I call her back?” asked Nathan.

“She knows where we are. She should be here with flowers. She should…” Lydia slipped off her breast. “Fuck! Will you please get the nurse back?”

Nathan pressed a button on the wall behind Edie’s bed. Edie bent forward, a canopy over the girl, trying to drop her breast into her now-dozing daughter’s slack mouth, trying to reestablish the latch. The fucking latch. She felt her back exposed in her gown. The thin sheet beneath her had bunched up. Did it even have fitted corners? How many other bare thighs had rubbed against this awful mattress? There was a knock at the door.

“Is this a good time?” asked her dad.

Edie almost laughed.

“I’m with your mom. Can we come in?”

As usual, Edie’s mom was dressed all in black. Skinny jeans and chunky boots and a short leather jacket. Her bleached blond hair was pulled into a chic low ponytail. Michelle Whitehouse had been a relatively young mom, too; just twenty-three when she got pregnant with Edie while shacking up with Gabe in the London suite where he was recording with Oasis. Still, Edie had correctly suspected that her mother would be disappointed with her own early twenties pregnancy, so she’d waited until after the City Hall ceremony to break the news: Happy New Year, you’re going to be grandparents! It went over like a lead zeppelin, as her dad used to say.

“You did it,” said Michelle, stepping toward the bed.

Edie felt like she would never not be angry at her mother. If it weren’t for her, Edie would be at home, instead of in this cold, ugly room. Instead of the rotating nurses, she would be cared for by Marianne, the doula she’d hired months ago, who was also a certified lactation consultant and massage therapist. That had been the plan until six weeks ago, when Michelle issued her ultimatum.