Chapter 2 - The Practice Contractions
Braxton Hicks started in early December — tight, rehearsal cramps, the body's own dress rehearsal for the real thing.
Emma learned to recognize them by feel before the app on her phone confirmed it. A gathering pressure, low and deliberate, then release, like a fist closing and opening.
The first time it happened at dinner, she'd gasped, hand flying to her belly.
Julian, across the table, hadn't looked up from his plate.
"You good?" he asked, to his food, not to her.
"Just a contraction. Practice ones. It's fine."
"Okay."
That was the whole exchange. Okay. One syllable, doing the work of a thousand questions he didn't ask.
---
She started, without quite deciding to, timing more than the contractions.
She timed how long it took him to look up from his phone when she walked into a room. Average: eleven seconds, if he looked up at all.
She timed how many questions he asked her, in a given day, about anything beyond logistics — grocery lists, mail, the plumber's arrival window.
Some days, the number was zero.
She didn't tell anyone she was keeping this second count. It felt, even to her, like something closer to evidence-gathering than marriage, and some stubborn, hopeful part of her still recoiled from that word.
---
Her mother called every few days, from two states away, unable to travel yet because of her own health, worried in the specific, low-frequency hum mothers get worried in when they sense something is wrong but can't yet point to it.
"How's Julian treating you?" she asked, in early December, careful, the way you ask a question you already suspect the answer to.
"He's stressed," Emma said. Her go-to sentence. Her armor, worn thin from overuse. "Work's been a lot."
"Emma."
"I'm fine, Mom."
Her mother had gone quiet on the line, the particular quiet of someone deciding not to push, though every instinct told her to.
"You call me," her mother said finally, "the second anything starts happening. Anything. I don't care what time it is."
"I will."
She meant it, when she said it.
She did not yet know how literally she would need to mean it.
---
The nursery was finished by December 10th — Emma had done it herself, mostly, over three exhausting weekends, hanging a mobile of paper cranes she'd folded one at a time during the long, quiet evenings Julian spent in his office with the door shut.
Pale yellow walls. A secondhand rocking chair she'd reupholstered in soft grey linen, sanding and stapling with her own hands, humming to herself the whole time, imagining a version of this life that still, somehow, felt possible.
Julian had seen the finished room exactly once.
"Looks nice," he'd said, from the doorway, phone already back at his ear before she could answer.
She'd stood alone in the doorway of the room she'd built, for their daughter, with her own two hands, and felt something in her chest go very quiet and very still, the way a house goes quiet right before it starts, finally, to fall.
---
There was a night, December 12th, when she woke at 3 a.m. to real pain — sharp, low, different from the practice contractions, gone again within a minute, but enough to leave her sitting upright in the dark, heart pounding.
She reached over. Julian's side of the bed was empty.
She found him in his office, laptop glow lighting his face blue in the dark, three empty coffee mugs beside the keyboard.
"I think something's happening," she said, from the doorway, one hand on her belly, the fear still fresh in her voice.
Julian glanced up. Then at his screen. Then back at her.
"Is it real labor or the practice kind?"
"I don't know yet. It felt different."
"Okay. Let me know if it gets worse." His eyes had already gone back to the screen before he finished the sentence.
She stood there another moment, waiting for something more — a hand reaching for hers, a body rising from the chair, anything — and when nothing came, she went back to bed alone, and lay awake until dawn, counting a pain that never fully resolved into either false or real, timing it against a silence that told her everything she still, somehow, refused to hear.
---
Her sister Kate came to visit that weekend, unannounced, the way sisters sometimes do when instinct overrides invitation.
She took one look at Emma — the hollows under her eyes, the careful, controlled way she was holding her body, as though bracing against something invisible — and set her purse down without being asked to stay.
"You look like hell," Kate said, gently. "Sit down. I'll make tea."
Emma sat. And for the first time in months, let herself be taken care of, however briefly, by someone in the apartment who noticed her exhaustion without needing to be told about it first.
"Where's Julian?" Kate asked, filling the kettle.
"Office. Big presentation Monday."
"It's Saturday."
"I know."
Kate didn't say anything else. She didn't need to. The silence between them said it clearly enough — a silence Emma had started to recognize as its own kind of conversation, the kind conducted entirely in things left unsaid.
---
Kate stayed two nights. In that time, Julian emerged from his office for meals exactly twice, greeted his sister-in-law with polite, distracted small talk, and disappeared again both times before dessert.
On the drive to the airport, Kate finally said the thing she'd clearly been holding since she arrived.
"Emma. I need you to hear this from someone who loves you. That man is not present for you. He hasn't been for a long time. And I'm scared for what happens once the baby actually comes, if this is what pregnancy looks like."
Emma had stared out the window at the passing grey highway, throat tight.
"He's her father, Kate. He'll show up for her. He has to."
"Does he?" Kate asked, quietly. "Because from where I'm sitting, he hasn't shown up for either of you in months."
Emma didn't answer.
She didn't have an answer that wasn't also, secretly, a small, terrified agreement.
---
December 18th. Two days before her due date.
Emma stood in the nursery that evening, folding tiny onesies into a drawer, humming without meaning to, the same tune she'd hummed while making the paper cranes.
Julian appeared in the doorway, unusually — actually present, actually looking at her.
For one hopeful second, her whole chest lifted.
"Hey," he said. "Did the dry cleaning come? I need the grey suit for Monday."
The lift in her chest fell, all at once, back to the floor.
"It's in the hall closet," she said, voice flat.
He nodded, already turning to check, already gone from the doorway before she'd finished the sentence, and Emma stood alone among the folded onesies, one hand pressed to the underside of her belly, feeling their daughter shift and settle, and thought, with a clarity that frightened her:
She's going to grow up watching this. Watching exactly this. Unless something changes.
May you like
She didn't know yet how soon, or how completely, something would.
---
