The silence after the birth room clears

I just closed the door on a room that held three people for eight hours. The air still smelled like sweat and antiseptic, but the tension was gone—like the room had exhaled. I stood there for a minute, listening to the quiet. Not empty, exactly. More like full of what hadn’t been said yet. That’s the thing about births: they don’t end. They just settle into the space between breaths.