For the first time in a long time, nobody’s sharpening anything on anyone or covering panic with jokes. The room is frozen on a quiet inhale.
The gel lands and I yip anyway. “Habit,” I tell Priya, who winks and rolls the probe lower, angles. The grainy universe on the screen stutters, then resolves.
There they are.
Three bright crescents of skull, like moons at different quarters. A curved spine, beads on a string. A flicker-flicker that always makes my throat close—hearts, throwing their light like they’ve got nothing to hide.
Sean exhales a laugh he doesn’t mean to let out. “Jaysus, would you look at them.”
Declan says nothing, but he squeezes my shoulder, sharing space with Sean’s hand, and I lift my hands to grip both of their fingers. When I glance up at him, tears are shining in his eyes under the fluorescent lighting of the hospital. He gasps when one moves and looks down at me with a tenderness I find alarming.
For a brief second, I think about my father and whether or not he had this reaction when he saw my ultrasound or my sister’s. Did he always know he’d run? Did he know in his gut that it wasn’t going to be my mom forever? Were we just collateral damage or was there something about us that made him want to try over again? He started another family with his mistress…was it guilt or were we damaged?
“Hey, where’d you drift to?” Rowan whispers, pulling me out of my head, and I blink up at him, not expecting that warmth from him. His voice is rougher than it should be, brushing low in my ear. My skin prickles where his breath lands. I shake my head, and he presses his palm to my head, like he might stroke my hair, and then he pulls back as Priya starts to talk.
Priya narrates. “Triplet A first. Head down, spine along your right. Heart rate is…” She trails off, and whatever she’s doing doesn’t matter to me because all I can focus on is how the baby’s hand floats up and bumps its own cheek. A real person is inside me, touching their real cheek with their real hand. “…one forty-two. Beautiful. Fluid’s good.
“Triplet B,” she continues, sliding the probe up and left. “Our wiggle worm. Breech at the moment—don’t panic, plenty of time to flip. Heart rate one forty. Practice breathing…see the chest? In-out, in-out. Overachiever.
“Triplet C,” she goes on, voice softer, because she somehow reads the way my breath shortens when we get to the last one. The probe dips; the machine hums. “Posterior. Shy. There we go. Heart rate one thirty-eight. All three reactive.”
Declan’s hand finds the rail of the exam table. He doesn’tsayanything, but the way his shoulders lower, as if he’s been carrying a backpack full of bricks, does it for him. “Reactive,” he whispers to himself. “Reactive is good.” He’s close enough that the word ghosts against my temple. I could count every lash if I turned my head.
The smallest face I’ve ever seen swims into view. I gasp. “Lord, look at that face.” The mouth opens, and I look over at her sharply. “Is he…she…are they crying?”
Priya shakes her head and smiles, a twinkle in her eye. “Yawning.”
“Oh! Oh.” Yawning. A real person who’s tired. Yawning, just like any one of us. My eyes sting, thinking about my child yawning in school or at a job or before bed. A real person with a real future. A tear falls down my cheek.
Rowan clears his throat. “Fetal growth percentiles?”
“Patel will give you the full report,” Priya replies, not looking away from the images. “But quick look is reassuring. Discordance is acceptable.”
“Discordance is acceptable,” I repeat, and Sean chuckles.
He leans over my shoulder and mutters, “It means they’re all growing at about the same rate—no one’s slacking off in there.”
Priya keeps rolling. The screen goes sci-fi—colors, pulses, river maps. “Umbilical artery looks good for all three. No absent end-diastolic flow. We like that.”
“We do, sure,” Declan says, and I catch the corner of his mouth shift, not quite a smile, more like a door propped open with a foot. “Grand readings all around,” he mutters to himself.
Rowan’s voice comes soft from just beside me, not meant for the room so much as for me. “They’re okay, Willow. Are you?”
“I am,” I whisper, and the oddest thing happens. The tension doesn’t flood back. It doesn’t sharpen. It just…eases, like someone put a palm flat between my shoulder blades.
The door clicks open and Dr. Patel glides in, coffee in hand, eyes bright in the low light. “Sorry, sorry, I spilled a coffee all over my keyboard this morning, and—” She cuts herself off and leans in,scanning the screen, then nods. “These look lovely. Everyone’s behaving for once,” she says. “Let’s keep it that way. Priya, biophysical profiles?”
Priya toggles. “Breathing: present. Movement: present. Tone: present. Fluid: adequate.” She clicks the keyboard like a pianist finishing a run. “Eight out of eight for each. Triple A’s top of the class.”
Sean leans down enough that I feel the whisper of his breath on my hair. “Show-off, so you are.”
“Stop talking about yourself,” I say, and we share a small grin we don’t need to push any farther.
Patel rounds to my side. “How areyou, Ms. Abel? Any headaches, visual changes, epigastric pain?”
“No,” I say. “Just…it scared me—the ‘reduced fetal movement.’” I say it sarcastically to mask how scared I really was. Terrified. Angry. Lost.
Declan makes a small sound I don’t recognize until I realize it’s him agreeing without words. I can’t even imagine how scary it was for him now that I know what he went through with Aiden. And still he was a rock for me. The memory threads through my chest like a stitch I need.
