for seven. This one seemed to last longer, and as it eased, I said, “Ashley, get my phone out of my sweater pocket.”
“Do you want me to call Daddy?” she asked.
I gave her a tiny smile. “What does it say at the top?”
“No service.”
“Look at you,” I said, rocking back on my heels as my stomach continued to relax. “You’re such a good reader. But that means we can’t make any calls. Now, I’m giving you two jobs, okay? One, you need to keep checking to see if those words go away and bars take their place.”
“Okay.”
“And second, do you know how to use the timer on a phone?”
She nodded. “I use it when I read. I have to read for twenty minutes every night. Two-zero, two dots, zero-zero.”
“Okay, then,” I said, trying to sound cheery. “I need you to time two things, okay? I need you to time how long until I have my next tummy ache, and then I need you to time how long it lasts. I know it’s a big job—”
“I can do it, Aunt Rose.”
I opened the lock screen and pulled up the timer app. “I know it’s been a bit since the last one went away, but go ahead and start it.”
“Are you havin’ your baby, Aunt Rose?” She stared at me with a serious expression, and she looked so much like my sister in that moment it took my breath away.
I reached out and cupped her cheek, missing Violet something fierce. “Not if I can help it. Not here. Which means we need to get goin’ again, okay?”
She nodded and started the timer, then took Mikey’s hand. “Come on, Mikey. I’ll hold your hand through this next part.”
He got up and the two of them started down the hill in front of me. I made better time without Mikey on my hip, but we hadn’t made it very far when another contraction hit.
“Ashley, how long?” I asked, deciding to keep walking as long as I could.
“One, two dots, three-two.”
“One minute and thirty-two seconds.” Which meant they really were now two minutes apart. Crap. Crap. Crap. That wasn’t good. How much farther until we made it to the creek? At this pace, probably forty or more minutes. “Stop the timer and start again, but keep walking.”
She tapped on the phone and gave me a look of surprise. “You don’t want to stop?”
“Not yet. Let’s see if we can get a few more feet.”
A few more feet was all I got before the contraction seemed to possess every part of my being. I grabbed a tree and fell to my knees, crying again.
“Come on, darlin’,” I heard Joe say in my head. “You’ve got this.”
“I don’t have this, Joe,” I said through my tears. “I don’t have this.” But as the contraction began to fade, I got back up on my feet, my entire body shaky.
Both kids stared at me in fear.
“It’s okay,” I assured them. “I’m okay.”
“Do you want me to stop the timer, Aunt Rose?” Ashley said in a small voice.
“Yeah.”
We continued like that for nearly thirty minutes, me pushing through as much of the pain and discomfort as I could. The sun wouldn’t set for a couple more hours, but the dense growth of the trees and the surrounding hills blocked the sunlight, making some areas of the path dark. We could use the flashlight on my phone, but the phone’s battery was at twenty percent. It wouldn’t be long before it was dead.
I couldn’t help wondering when the Collards would figure out that the kids were gone. I hadn’t replaced the bar over the door, which meant they’d probably notice sooner rather than later. Would they know where to look for us? Maybe. They knew how to live off the land, which meant they were probably trackers.
We needed to get to the truck before they found us.
Mikey was scared and weak from lack of food. He got too tired to continue walking, so I put him on my hip and clutched trees to hold us upright. And when the next contraction hit, I focused on a rock about fifteen feet ahead, telling myself that I could only stop if I made it to that spot. Somehow I did. The contraction washed over me as I set Mikey down. I fell onto my hands and knees, unable to hold back my agonized cries. I rocked back and forth, praying God would see fit to let me have help with this baby, because