Not just for her sake.
But because somewhere in the twisting corridors of my grief, I'd forgotten how to do anything else.
I messaged the radiologist and sonographer to advise them that I would conduct the next ultrasound. They could take a break. It was time to meet the young woman who was determined to become a mother.
When I called her name no one stood up. It was a large waiting room and I glanced at where the lady's toilets were. Frequent urination was prevalent in the final trimester. A few women were looking at me but no one stood up.
“Charlotte Hutton,” I called again with a frown.
“Present,” a husky voice said.
An auburn-haired woman pushed herself off the seat with her hand raised as she stood up. While she said something to a woman beside her, I admired the view. She wore black leggings with a bright mustard sweater. My lips twitched because she looked as if she had swallowed the sun. Due to her petite stature, she waddled toward me.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Vale,” I said with a smile while she cleared her throat. We will go straight for the ultrasound, and once I’ve taken a look, we can discuss the results.”
She nodded, but I saw the fear and concern in her soft hazel eyes. Her hand rested on her baby, and she rubbed it, soothing both.
“I am very thorough. You're in good hands, Ms Hutton,” I said before leading the way.
???
The gel pooled warm against Charlotte’s abdomen, a stark contrast to the clinical chill of the examination room. She lay there, this auburn-haired sprite of a woman, barely five feet of her stretched across the table, looking up at me with those wide, hazel eyes. Eyes that held none of the knowing cruelty of my ex-wife, none of the weary suspicion most single mothers carried. Just trust—sweet, stupid trust.
Her breasts strained against the fabric of the knitted sweater, swollen with impending motherhood, the valley between them deepening with each breath. The curve of her belly was a perfect arc beneath my gloved hands, taut and ripe as summer fruit. I could have traced the roadmap of her stretch marks on that delicate skin and counted every freckle that dotted her collarbones like constellations. But it wasn’t her body that fascinated me.
It was what grew inside it.
The transducer glided through the gel, and the screen flickered to life in grayscale static. For a moment, there was nothing but the vague shadow-play of limbs, the rhythmic pulse of the heartbeat. Then—movement.
The foetus turned.
A searing light erupted from the monitor, white as a star going supernova. I flinched, my grip tightening on the wand, but the image burned through my retinas, seared itself onto the backs of my eyelids. Not a blur of undeveloped features. Not some anonymous child.
Elias.
My son’s face—those impossible blue-and-yellow eyes, the mutation that had skipped generations only to land in him—stared back at me from the screen. His lips parted, not in the gummy smile of infancy, but in something sharper. Knowing.
“Da-da.”
The voice crackled through the ultrasound speakers, tinny and distorted, the sound of a child calling from the bottom of a well. My breath lodged in my throat. The room tilted. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the light dimmed. The screen resolved into the ordinary shapes of a twenty-week scan—a spine like a string of pearls, the flutter of tiny fingers.
But I had seen it.
I had heard it.
My gloves creaked as my fists clenched. Charlotte shifted beneath my hands, her voice a distant buzz.
“Is everything alright, Doctor?”
I forced myself to smile, making my voice smooth as the gel on her skin. “Perfect,” I murmured, dragging the transducer lower. The lie came easily, polished by years of comforting undeserving mothers. My pulse hammered against my collarbone, and my tie felt like a tightening noose. My heart fluttered erratically like a trapped butterfly.
He was perfect.
My son. My Elias. Somehow, impossibly, here.
In Charlotte Hutton’s body.
And I would burn the universe down to keep him.
