"Dad? What are you doing up here?" Troy turned from the dry erase board as Jack panted a bit and faced him. "You okay?"
"I am so out of shape," Jack panted again, regaining his breath.
"I could've told you that," Troy chuckled as the rest of his AP Class echoed.
"You have to go home and get your wife and go to the hospital."
"Wha…." Troy trailed off as he realized what he was saying. "Are you kidding me? She's early and why didn't she call my cell phone?"
"She said she did, but you weren't answering so she called me," Jack said, watching his son scramble for his bags on his desk. "Just go, I'll handle them."
"Thanks Dad," Troy barely said goodbye with a hit on the shoulder before he was out the door.
"One more deep breath, sweetheart," Troy told Gabriella as she sat straight up on the hospital bed and breathed in deep, trying not to let the sharp pain of the needle get to her. It was probably her least favorite part of the whole process. She hated it, absolutely hated it.
"And there we go. Okay, Mrs. Bolton, let's lay you back down," Dr. Jaclyn Green, the anesthesiologist told her and both the doctor and Troy helped her back down. "The anesthetic should start kicking in a few minutes. I'll be around the wing all night so if you need anything, just shout down the hall. I have six children and I swear I could hear them all from three thousand miles away," Dr. Green winked at Gabriella and turned to start cleaning up her equipment.
"Thanks Dr. Green," Gabriella barely whispered as she clutched onto Troy's hand. Another big contraction went through her body just as Sara and Taylor returned to the maternity suite with food for them and Troy.
Troy watched the monitor intently as the lines got thicker and sharper. And then they died down again. They had been in the suite for nearly eight hours already and there was no budging from five centimeters. They were only halfway through it all.
"Taylor, didn't you go to the Evan's the other day?" Gabriella suddenly asked out of the blue, remembering the fact that Taylor had pointed it out every ten seconds days before.
"Yea, I did. He's really a great doctor."
"So…"
"So, what?" Taylor smiled knowing exactly what Gabriella was getting at.
"You're not going to tell us…me! I mean, I remember you once told me it was illegal not to tell your best friend."
"Chad and I want to wait, so we're waiting. We like being surprised."
Troy snorted at her comment and sat back down by Gabriella, snatching a sandwich from the tray. "That will last oh, let's say two months. This is Chad we're talking about here."
Taylor smacked him on his knee and poked out her tongue, "We're still waiting."
Evan snapped the blue glove against his wrist, all because he liked the sound, and placed the thin sheet back over her legs. "You moved, but not much," he sighed, hoping that this would've taken a lot less time than it was already. "The potosin didn't work very well, did it?" he joked as he saw Troy and Gabriella both give him looks. "We know what this means, right?"
"Cesarean?" Troy rhetorically asked and received a nod from Evan. "Do we have to?"
"Yes, Troy, we have to. After the hands procedure and Gabriella not moving to ten centimeters in this amount of time, we have to. We want your daughter to be alive and well and safe," Evan told them, slipping out of the gloves and tossing them in the trash can just beside the wall. "I'm gonna go and get an OR set up, you two stay here. Wendy or Faith will be in to tell you what happens next."
And with that he was out of the room. Gabriella tugged on Troy's shirt; his two day old shirt that smelled like him through and through, pulling his attention back to her. He sat back down on the chair's edge and kissed her knuckles. He wasn't planning on a cesarean, and neither was she.
"Everything will be fine Troy," she softly told him. "Everything."
"Okay, Gabriella," Evan announced from the other side of the blue tarp in front of her and she looked in the mirror and watched the medical team reach a leg- a very tiny leg, "one more nudge from us and you'll be a Mommy again. How does that feel?"
"Very rewarding, Evan," Gabriella smiled as his hands, as well as Peter's and the others, gently glided her newborn daughter out of her womb. "Oh my gosh…Troy…"
"I see her baby, I see her," Troy, seated right beside her, said, his eyes watching everything about the little girl now. "That's our daughter," he whispered as Megan's cry was heard soundly throughout the room.
"You're a Daddy again," Gabriella said through her happy tears and Troy kissed her soundly.
"And you're a Mommy."
"Okay, here we go," Wendy, one of the surgical nurses walked over to him and placed the tiny girl in his arms, "Congratulations Mom and Dad."
"Gabby, she's…"
"Perfect."