She thrust something into my hand and it took me a second to realize what it was. A strip of glossy black-and-white images. For a second, I didn’t understand what I was looking at—and then I did.
I stared down at the images, then up into her watery blue eyes, then back down again. “No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes,” she said, teary-eyed but smiling now, almost laughing. “Look at the date. They’re not old images. They were taken today.”
“How did this happen?”
“It’s your fault.”
“My fault?” I sputtered, shifting the twins in my arms as my brain tried to reboot. “How is it my fault?”
“We thought we didn’t need to be careful yet,” she half-laughed, half-cried, dabbing at her cheeks. “Apparently, we really, really did.”
I looked at the ultrasound images again, the grainy images far too familiar, and then at the woman I adored before I glanced at the two little girls staring at us curiously. “Are you telling me…”
She nodded. “Yes. Twins again.”
I blinked rapidly, feeling the tears that were gathering in my own eyes now. “Again. As in… two.”
“Two,” she confirmed, laughter bubbling up through her tears. “It looks like you only fire doubles, mister.”
Suddenly, I couldn’t help laughing with her. We collapsed against one another with that kind of disbelieving,oh fucklaughter that came from the place of shock, sheer exhaustion, and joy colliding head on.
On speakerphone, Trent let out a low whistle. “Well, damn. Y’all don’t waste time.”
I stared at the phone. “Trent, hang up.”
“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “Stayin’ right here. This is better than TV.”
Sadie nodded rapidly, tears pooling, laughter and panic blending in her voice. “I know, I know, it’s crazy?—”
“Crazy?” Trent cut in. “Sweetheart, I wrangle horses, bulls, and three dozen ranch hands. Babies can’t be that different.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Trent.”
He kept going. “Just keep ‘em fed, loved, and away from power tools. Easy.”
“We’re insane,” I said when I could finally speak again. “Clinically, certifiably insane.”
“Completely,” she agreed, grinning through her tears. Then she reached over, took the phone from my hands, and hung up on her brother before looking up at me again. “How are we going to do this, Jamie?”
Hooch barked once more, the twins giggled in stereo, and I looked down at the tiny ultrasound photos again. Two more heartbeats, two more miracles we hadn’t planned but that, somehow, already belonged to us.
“Obviously, Hooch is volunteering to babysit,” I said. “Do you think we can teach him to change a diaper?”
Sadie clutched the ultrasound photos when I handed them back to her, looking like she might hyperventilate. The borderline hysteria and laughter had faded fast, the spiral of panic I’d been expecting before she’d burst into tears finally hitting.
“Seriously, Jamie. What are we going to do? We’re only two people and we both work full-time. We’ll be outnumbered two to one, and the girls are only three months old. They might not even be walking yet by the time these are born and they’ll fall. A lot. What if they hurt themselves because we’re too busy with the babies? What if?—”
Instinct kicked in for me as she rambled. That same calm, controlled instinct that chopped up multimillion-dollar companies and ran a calendar scheduled down to the minute. For the last few months, I’d been applying it to diaper changes, feeding rotations, and emotional triage. I could expand it to deal with this, too. To settle the new wave of chaos that was about to overrun our home.
“Okay,” I said finally, my voice more even and steadier than I felt. “First, we breathe. Then we celebrate. Then we panic.”
Sadie blinked up at me, her lower lip trembling. “Jameson, I can’t. What if I can’t do this again?”
