I was five days overdue. “Go fetch the washing off the line,” Mom said, “let’s see if that gets things started.” So I grunted down over my belly, grabbed the laundry basket, and lumbered through the yard in bare feet. I glanced back. Mom was watching my slow progress from the back step, hands on hips. With her lower lip stuck out in a pout, she looked like a squat jug pouring out something bitter.

    “If you ever get pregnant and there’s no dad, don’t come running to me.” Mom repeated through all my teenage infatuations and breakups. I always thought she was talking about money and a place to live, but when Connor said, “A baby changes everything,” and took off, she let me come home for the rest of my pregnancy. Practical assistance was as far as it went, though. She’d meant she would give no emotional support for stupidity. No sympathy or even a hug.

    The washing lines stood on a rise past the apple orchard, where the laundry could catch the most sun. Two rows of sheets billowed in sweet breezes, and echoing them, I swelled in my cousin’s yellow maternity dress. The orchard smelled of cidery, fallen apples, and lush green, the grass spongy between my toes. The first sheet puffed into my face when I reached over my head to the pegs, and I let it rest there for a moment to breathe in the calm of clean linen. A warning twinge between my hips and a downward pull in my abdomen told me the peace was about to end. Mom had had the right idea.

    As I pulled down the sheet and brought the edges together to fold it, my arms wrapped around someone standing on the other side. If I’d been able to see over my bump, I might have noticed legs and shoes below the edge of the sheet, but I was clueless that anyone was there until I had enclosed broad shoulders in the cloth, pressed my stomach against a hard belt buckle, and rested my forehead on a rising and falling chest. Shrouded arms snapped around me, and my breath pinched in panic. 

    Connor. My heart swung into dizzy hope—he’d changed his mind, decided to be a dad. But when the man spoke, it wasn’t my boyfriend’s whine that came muffled through the sheet.

    “Don’t move, don’t make a noise, or I’ll hurt you. Understand?” This voice was steel-tipped. I caught the man’s scent through the sun-hot sheet: the smell of fear.

    I tightened a fist to hit him, but he pressed the muzzle of a gun hard to my side. I stilled, nodded. My nose snubbed against his chest. One of his perfectly round shirt buttons indented my forehead.

    Deep inside me, a bright flourish of pain ignited. I creased over its fire.

    “Don’t move away. Listen to me,” he said, his voice urgent but steady. “I need a vehicle. Where’s the car, truck, whatever?”

    To hell with him. There was just my mom’s beat-up Dodge, and we’d need that to get to the hospital twenty miles away. If he was the world’s most desperate criminal, his escape was not more important than my baby. I groaned and shifted.

    He lowered his hands to my hips to stop my movement. 

    “Jesus, is that a baby bump?” He loosened his grip. “Shit.” His hands were hesitant now. They clasped me again as I tensed for the next strike of pain. This time, he wasn’t restraining me.

    Then—veiled by the sheet, so close—he asked a gentle question, “When are you due?”

    “Now,” I said, gasping. Sharp pincers pulled threads of molten steel through my core. 

    He strained with me through the contraction as I grabbed him, my forearms pressed down on his. The white bedsheet tangled up between us, and I wrestled with a ghost. A phantom with substance and a weapon, whose legs braced against my push. 

    No one had wrapped their arms around me in six months. Not one person had kissed me, stroked my belly, rubbed my back, or reached for me. Everyone had turned away. While this criminal supported me, the agony withdrew, my breath released, and I sank into his embrace.

    No, sinking wasn’t an option. A lull now, but the baby’s arrival was a hard fact, as solid as the gun in the outlaw’s hand. Like clothes lifted from the drying line in a hopeful gust, I pushed myself upright. “My mom’s here. She’ll come looking for me.” I said through the material. “I’ll hold this sheet up again. You’re going to go to your left. Cut through the orchard. Dave’s Auto Repair is down the road. He keeps the keys in all the car ignitions. Go.” 

    His arms released from under mine. I sensed him move sideways, aware of the emptiness in front of me, heard him whisper, “Thank you,” then he was gone. 

    In the maternity hospital the next day, I glanced up at the TV screen and saw him. He looked like a felon: shaved head, a swirling tattoo rising up his neck. Armed and dangerous, the news ticker warned.

    I wondered how long he would run before they found him. They would get him, for sure. Bent over the child cradled in my arms, I nuzzled into her newness, her enthralling scent of warm summer linen freshly gathered from the washing line.