My Husband Skipped Our Son’s Birth For His Mother’s Sixtieth Dinner — Three Days Later, He Went Pale At The Sight Of The Man Rocking Our Newborn

Chapter 2

The labor took fourteen hours, and Maxwell Thorne never once let go of my hand.

I had expected him to be awkward. My father was a man of balance sheets and boardrooms, a man who had once ended a phone call with a head of state to take a call from me about a broken bicycle. But childbirth was not a spreadsheet. There was no way to model it, no contingency plan that could account for the particular animal terror of a body splitting itself open to make room for a life.

And yet he was magnificent.

He held the basin when I was sick. He counted through contractions in the low, calm voice he used for hostile acquisitions. He fetched ice chips and told me, completely deadpan, that I was doing “better than the market in ’08,” which was the single most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me.