That night, in the hotel, I couldn’t sleep.

My lower back had been aching all day. A dull, heavy ache, low down, right where my spine met my hips. I’d felt it starting in the morning, when I was sitting by Dad’s bed.

I blamed the hospital chairs. Those chairs are terrible. Hard plastic seats and wooden arms, designed by someone who has never had to sit in one for fourteen hours straight.

I’d barely slept in three nights. My legs were swollen from standing beside his bed. My feet hurt. Everything hurt.

It was easy to explain away one more thing.

Daniel didn’t like the idea of flying home so soon.

“We could stay another couple of days,” he said in the morning, while I was packing. “Just until you’re rested. Your back’s been bothering you.”

“My back’s been bothering me since week twenty,” I said. “That’s what backs do when you’re carrying a bowling ball in front of you.”

“Hannah.”

“Dr. Abrams said it was fine. Dad wants us to go. I want to go home. I want to sleep in my own bed.” I zipped up the suitcase. “I want to finish painting the nursery.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“Okay,” he said. “But I’m carrying everything.”

“You were always going to carry everything.”

At the airport in Phoenix, he hovered.

He carried both bags. He carried my purse. He tried to carry my water bottle. He walked so close behind me that he kept stepping on the back of my shoes.

At the security line, he looked around.

“Want me to find a wheelchair?” he asked.

“I’m pregnant,” I said. “Not made of glass.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m still allowed to worry.”

I turned around and kissed him on the cheek. He smelled like the hotel soap.

“Worry quieter,” I said.

We boarded behind a man in a navy suit.

He was maybe sixty. Tall, with silver hair combed straight back, and an expensive watch, and the kind of shoes that click on the floor. He was talking on his phone. Loudly. Sharply. The way people talk when they don’t care who hears.

“I said I’d be there,” he said into the phone. “I said I’d be there. Stop changing things without asking me.”

The woman beside him was about his age. She had short gray hair and a soft cardigan and a garment bag over her arm. She touched his elbow. She looked uncomfortable. Embarrassed.

“Please stop,” she whispered.

He ignored her.

“No. No. That’s not what we agreed on. I’m not going to argue about this on the phone.”

The woman took out her own phone and started typing something. She typed fast, with her thumbs, looking down.

“We’ll make it,” she said to him quietly. “We’ll make it.”

Finally, he hung up. He didn’t say goodbye to whoever was on the other end. He just jabbed the screen with his thumb and shoved the phone into his jacket pocket.

He looked annoyed. Like the whole world was standing in his way.

I forgot about him as soon as we found our seats.

We were in row twenty-three. I had the aisle, so I could get up to use the bathroom. Daniel had the middle. The window seat was empty.

Across the aisle sat an older woman. She was probably seventy-five. White hair in a braid. A purple sweater with little embroidered birds on it. A paperback mystery in her lap and a tin of mints.

She looked over at me while I was trying to buckle my seatbelt around my stomach.

“Peppermint?” she said, holding out the tin. “It helps with the ears on the way down.”

“Thank you,” I said, and took one.

“I’m Teresa,” she said.

“Hannah. And this is Daniel.”

She looked at my belly. “Is this your first?”

I nodded.

She smiled at Daniel. A big, slow, knowing smile.

“Then you,” she said to him, “are about to discover a whole new kind of tired.”

Daniel laughed. “I’ve heard.”

“You’ve heard,” Teresa said, shaking her head. “Oh, honey. Hearing isn’t the same thing at all.”