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“My water just broke on your hardwood floors,” she says. “You’re welcome.”

There is a beat of silence appropriate to the moment.

“The original oak herringbone?” I ask, my brain refusing to process the moment properly.

“Preston, that’s not important.” Luke is already out of bed, dressed, and holding the go-bag, apparently having passed through all three states simultaneously.

“It’s extremely important. It’s a period floor, Luke.”

“It’s a floor, it’s lasted this long, it’ll survive another night.” He has his keys. “Elena. Contractions?”

“Eleven minutes, forty seconds apart. I timed them against my sleep app.” She’s already turning down the hall. “They woke me up before they woke you up, which frankly tracks for this family. I’m getting my bag. Nobody carry me. If anyone attempts to carry me, I’m having these babies at a hotel. So help me God.”

We are in the car by 03:19. I know it’s 03:19 because Luke says “03:19” out loud and then drives the Escape through the sleeping borough with the composure of an ambulance and none of the speed, because he has already worked out that we have a comfortable margin, and running this particular yellow light would save thirty seconds but be entirely too risky.

“Lucas,” Elena says from the back seat, in Mama Ortiz’s exact register. “Just drive faster.”

He drives faster.

Here is a thing I did not anticipate: St. Jude’s, at 03:40, from the wrong side.

I’ve walked into this building a thousand times. I know its smells the way you know a family recipe – antiseptic, burnt coffee, and low-grade simmering panic. But we come through the doors tonight and none of my badges matter, none of Luke’s do either, and I watch it hit him in real time: the corridor he could walk blindfolded rearranging itself into unknown country. He stops for half a second at the junction where he would normally turn left, toward Trauma.

We turn right. Labour and Delivery. He’s not the attending here. He’s the family.

I take his hand, to reassure both of us.

Elena is admitted with an efficiency that has nothing to do with the York name and everything to do with the fact that word travels through a night-shift hospital faster than any pathogen: Ortiz’s grandbabies are coming. We have a room within eleven minutes. The nurse who settles Elena in mentions, casually, that the fourth floor has already started a pool on the baby’s weights and I am not to tell anyone she said so.

Mama Ortiz arrives at 04:02. She’s wearing scrubs – off duty, and wearing scrubs anyway – and on her head is a scrub cap I have never seen before: navy, patterned with tiny silver baby rattles. It has creases from the packaging still. She has been saving this cap. There is a non-zero chance she has been saving this cap since before the embryo transfer, and I am choosing, for my own wellbeing, not to establish the purchase date.

She kisses Elena’s forehead, checks the monitor tracing with one flick of her eyes, and assumes command of the room without raising her voice or, as far as I can tell, even using words. Within four minutes the pillows are correct, the ice chips have arrived, the attending has stood up straighter, and the tone of the entire floor has shifted into the particular crispness of a department that knows a charge nurse is watching, even when the charge nurse is technically here as a grandmother.

“Mamá stays,” Elena announces, around 05:30, when the contractions have found a rhythm with spicy opinions. She points at the rest of us. “Everyone else, out.”

“Elena, what if–”

“Out. I love you both. You’re too loud, Preston, and Lucas, you keep reading my monitor and making the face that freaks me out. Take the face to the waiting room, where it can terrorise others. I’ll send for you at the good part, when you get your babies and I get my cheque.” A contraction arrives; she breathes through it flat-eyed, like an accountant reviewing a bad quarter, and finishes: “This is a billable hour. I bill better without an audience.”

We take the face to the waiting room.

The waiting room, at 06:00, is my theatre, and the cast has assembled without a curtain call.

My father is already there, though I’m not quite sure how.

Elena’s water broke at 03:07, we told no one but Rosa, and Alistair York – who lives in Costa Rica – is sitting in the St. Jude’s family waiting room at 06:00 in a linen suit, golden-tanned, rested, holding a box of cigars, as though he has been dropped into position by helicopter, which I am not prepared to rule out.

“How did you even get here? And where is Miguel?” I say.

“Sloane,” my father says, which is a complete sentence in this family. “She called me Tuesday and told me to fly Wednesday. I asked why. She said, and I quote, ‘The window is opening.’ Preston, I did not ask further questions. One does not ask Sloane about windows. As for Miguel, he wanted to be present but felt it would be best if he wasn’t around your mother too much, didn’t want to distract from the babies. He sends his best wishes though, of course. Cigar anyone?”

“Father, it’s a maternity ward.”

“It’s a lobby, son. Adjacent to a maternity ward. The distinction has legal precedent. Or so I’m told by my legal team.” He is already distributing cigars to the assembled – Max accepts one and files it in his breast pocket clearly with no intention of ever smoking it; Jax takes one and eats half a protein bar instead, and Luke accepts another holding it nervously between his fingers – and then my father, a man in his seventies with no sense of discretion, produces a cutter and a match and lights one, indoors, at dawn, in a hospital.

The nurse arrives within twenty seconds. She is approximately five feet three inches tall and she storms into the waiting room.

“Sir. You cannot smoke here.”