“We can be your priority without you burning your whole life down.” My voice came out firmer than I felt. “I’m not asking you to choose. I’m telling you that giving up everything isn’t the answer.”
He looked at me with frustration on his face, desperation underneath. He wanted to fix this. He wanted to solve it the way he solved everything, with force and stubbornness and sheer refusal to accept a problem he couldn’t power through. But this wasn’t a porch step. This was two lives that didn’t fit in the same place anymore.
“Then what do you want me to do?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. The answer was there, forming, but I wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.
I told him about the anatomy scan a few days later, on a Tuesday morning while he was sitting on the porch with his coffee.
“I have an ultrasound on Thursday. The big one, where they check everything.” I leaned against the doorframe. “If you want to come.”
He looked up so fast his coffee sloshed over the rim. “Yes.”
“It’s at ten. Don’t be late.”
He showed up early. I got to the clinic at quarter to ten and his rental car was already in the lot, engine off, coffee cup onthe roof empty and cold. He was pacing beside the driver’s side door with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, which normally would have been distracting but right now was just evidence that he’d been here long enough to get restless.
“How long have you been here?”
“A while.”
“Finneas.”
“I didn’t want to be late.”
“Relax, caveman. The baby isn’t going anywhere.”
He was worse inside than the last appointment. He hovered behind the technician asking about every dial and readout, wanted to know what each number on the screen meant, tried to read the tech’s face every time she paused the wand. She asked him to step back twice. He stepped back approximately two inches each time.
I grabbed his hand, pulled him down into the chair beside me, and pointed at it. “Sit. Stay.”
“I’m not a dog.”
“Debatable.”
The tech squeezed the gel on my belly, cold enough to make me flinch, then pressed the wand against my skin. The screen flickered. And there he was.
The baby was on the monitor. Bigger than last time, so much bigger, a head, a spine, arms, legs tucked up tight. The heartbeatfilled the room, fast and strong, and I’d heard it before at earlier appointments but never with Finneas beside me holding my hand so hard my fingers went white. The sound was different with him here. Fuller. Like it had been waiting for both of us.
I watched his face instead of the screen because his face was the better view. His jaw went slack. His eyes went wide. I could see his throat working, swallowing against whatever was building in his chest.
“Everything looks healthy,” the tech said. “Good measurements, strong heartbeat. Right on track.”
My eyes filled. Tears ran down my temples because I was on my back and gravity was a design flaw nobody had addressed. I laughed, wiping my face with the back of my free hand while still gripping his with the other.
“Want to know the gender?” the tech asked.
I looked at Finneas. “Do you?”
“Healthy is all I care about.” His voice was rough, barely there. “Boy or girl.”
“I want to know.”
“Then we know.”
The tech moved the wand, checked the angle, smiled. “It’s a boy.”
I grinned so wide my face hurt. A son. I was having a son. I looked at Finneas and he was staring at the screen with an expression I’d never seen on him, not the office face, notthe King face, not the groveling face. This was something else entirely. Open, stunned, cracked apart in the best way.
