The silence after the birth room

I just closed the door on a labour that ended in a transfer. The room was empty now, and the kind of quiet you only get when someone’s been screaming for hours and then suddenly stops. I stood there with my hands still full of clamps and gauze, listening to the fridge hum in the corridor. It felt like a different kind of work — not delivering babies, but holding space for what didn’t happen. I don’t know if that counts as care, but it’s what I do.