My husband, Daniel, booked us on the first flight out the next morning.

I was thirty-four weeks pregnant. Our first baby. A girl. Up until then, the pregnancy had been boring, in the best way. No problems. No scares. My doctor, Dr. Abrams, had laughed at my last appointment and said, “Honestly, Hannah, you’re the most uneventful patient I’ve had all year.”

I called her from the car on the way to the airport.

“Is it safe to fly?”

“Your last checkup was perfect,” she said. “Thirty-four weeks is fine for domestic flights. Drink water. Walk the aisle every hour. Go be with your dad.”

So we went.

Dad was unconscious when we got to the hospital.

He was lying in a bed in the cardiac ICU with tubes in his nose and wires taped to his chest. A machine next to him beeped in a slow, steady rhythm. He looked so small. My father had never looked small in his whole life. He was a big, loud man who worked thirty-five years for the water department and could still carry a bag of potting soil under each arm.

Rachel was sitting in the chair next to him. She stood up when we came in and hugged me so hard it hurt.

“They don’t know,” she said into my shoulder. “They keep saying they don’t know.”

The cardiologist came in a little while later. A tall woman with gray braids and kind, tired eyes.

“He had a significant heart attack,” she said. “We’ve put in a stent, and the blood flow is better. But he was without oxygen for a while before your sister found him. We need him to wake up on his own. I can’t promise you that he will. I wish I could.”

For two days, I sat beside his bed.

Rachel and I took shifts. Daniel brought us coffee and sandwiches and made phone calls to people I didn’t have the energy to call. He took care of everything. He’s good at that. He’s an engineer. When the world is falling apart, he makes a list.

I talked to Dad the whole time. The nurse said it might help. She said people sometimes hear more than you’d think.

So I told him everything I could think of.

I told him about the nursery. About the green paint I couldn’t decide on.

I told him about the crib.

“Daniel put it together last weekend,” I said. “He wouldn’t let me help. He said he had a system. He read the instructions three times. Three, Dad. And he still put the whole front panel on backward. The little bars were facing inward. When he stepped back to admire it, he said, Huh,and then he just stood there for like a full minute.”

I held Dad’s hand. It was warm and heavy and didn’t move.

“He had to take the whole thing apart and do it again,” I said. “He was so mad. You would have laughed so hard. You would have laughed until you had to sit down.”

The machine beeped.