⸻
“Callie,” I said, “this is considerably more than a summer job story.”
⸻
“I know,” she said. “Nadia went into labor three weeks ago. Early morning, in our cabin bathroom. There wasn’t time to get her to a hospital before the baby actually came. I helped deliver her myself, Mom. I’d never done anything even close to that in my entire life, and I just — I didn’t have a choice in the moment.”
⸻
My chest tightened, working through the image of my nineteen-year-old daughter delivering a baby alone in a staff cabin bathroom, three hours away from me, with no one else to call.
⸻
“Once she was born,” Callie continued, “I got Nadia to the resort’s first aid office, and the on-site nurse got them both properly checked at the hospital that same afternoon, once things had settled enough to move her safely. Nadia and the baby stayed there two nights for observation. Everything was fine, medically. But Nadia wasn’t fine, not in any other way.”
⸻
“What do you mean?” I asked.
⸻
“She kept saying she couldn’t do it,” Callie said. “That she’d planned to leave the state the second she felt strong enough to travel, get somewhere her stepfather could never find her, and that a newborn baby made that considerably harder to actually manage safely. She asked me, Mom. Not casually. She sat me down and asked me directly if I’d take her.”
