“I thought your little girl was going to come to school today,” Becca says. Polite but direct

"Emmy?” Her daughter has fallen asleep. Hannah puts an arm on her shoulder and rocks her gently. Emmy’s eyes flutter open.

“Emmy, dear, I need your help.”

Felix stands at the doorway, his arms crossed, unbelieving.

Hannah throws him instructions: collect firewood, blankets, wine or cognac. It’s been years since she had a baby, decades, and she cannot think of what might be needed, apart from her daughter’s help. He disappears.

Emmy sits up.

“Emmy, you have to get up. I must attend a birth, and I shall need you.”

Emmy rubs her eyes. “Me, Mama? What do I know? Besides, I’m tired.”

She has an urge to shake Emmy. But she takes a second look at her daughter. “You have not been sleeping well. I know that.”

Something in her daughter’s face relaxes.

“But this is important.” She knows her daughter. For all her cossetting and spoiling, at a moment of crisis, she will come through.

Hannah walks over to the bedroom window and lifts the curtain. The wind blows rough, and the rain is almost horizontal. Never mind. She has walked through worse.

She turns back to her daughter. Emmy has slipped back down under her covers. “Don’t they say childbirth is the most natural thing in the world? Why do you need me?”

Hannah turns back and takes in the sight. The white frills are pulled up around Emmy’s chin, so she looks like a little child.

It’s not that the woman has fled her home. It’s not just that she is without family. Without husband, even. It’s that she’s having a baby, and it is on the seam of life that you encounter death, or what looks like death, or what may become death, and it is there that hands, womanly hands, your sisters in this world, join you and first coax, then command, find the strength for life. It is there that a woman, with her compassion and her strength says, it may feel easier, sometimes, to abandon the world, to slip away from the weariness of sorrow. But there is a tomorrow, and it kicks inside your womb, and your job is not just to bring it into This World, but also prepare it for the World to Come. And for that, it will need the safe cradle of a mother’s arms and the vision of a mother’s eyes. So stay with us, be with us, dear sister, even as you dance on the threshold.

She takes a deep breath. “Five minutes, Emmy. I need you downstairs, with your cloak on, in five minutes.”