Awakened at 2:30 a.m., Jet arrives at a birthing center to photograph a third-time mother in labor. She observes the calm, practiced rhythm of the midwife and assistant, the couple’s intimacy, and the room prepared for delivery. As contractions intensify, Jet focuses on dignified images, noting the mother’s physical ordeal and the father’s steady support.

When the mother transitions to hands-and-knees and begins to push, Jet documents the climactic moments: the mother’s roar, the father’s tears, and the baby’s emergence. Jet’s internal monologue wrestles with the brutality and beauty of birth, the immediate separation of cutting the cord, and the paradox that to welcome life is to guarantee loss.

She continues shooting as the newborn cries and then latches to breast, recognizing that the parents want the pain preserved because it is inseparable from preserving life. The room’s happiness affects Jet despite her skepticism, and she captures the reunion of mother and child.

Leaving the birth, Jet drives to Lillian’s grave and releases pent-up anger—about Lillian’s secrecy around Davis’s birth and adoption, about suffering alone, and about dying. She voices questions about Lillian’s relationships and whether Ryan cried when Jet herself was born, and whether death hurts as much as birth.

Jet reflects that eight years after Lillian’s death, grief has not healed; the revelation of Davis has reframed everything. Quieter, she shares her plan at the graveside: she will apply to school to become a nurse-midwife—work that fits what she calls her “doctor-heart.” The certainty feels like solving a mystery she should have known all along.

She acknowledges the hard truths of the field—that not all babies survive and not all mothers keep their babies. Rain begins to fall, and Jet lies beside the headstone under the now-larger oak, opening herself to the downpour and to being alive, sealing her resolve.