Everyone stares at me expectantly, but the decision isn’t so easy. Once I know, baby girl or baby boy, I’ll only get further attached. What if Eleanor wins? What if… What if I actually don’t get to take this baby home with me?What then? What would be left?Whit, what the hell do I do?
The technician adjusts the wand. The image shifts, rotates, finding the angle. A pause. A small smile.
“Tell us,” I finally say, heart pounding fast enough to match the baby’s.
“Baby girl. It’s a girl.”
The room exhales. Every person in it, all at once, releasing something they didn’t know they were holding.
Raven lets out a sound that is half laugh, half sob. “I knew it. The kicks were pink. I told you.”
The technician smiles. “She’s measuring perfectly. Strong bones, good fluid levels. Heart rate is one-forty-two, which is textbook. She’s a healthy little girl.”
I don’t make a sound. I can’t. Something has sealed shut in my throat, a valve that won’t release, and behind it is everything: the joy, the terror, the grief, the love, the bankruptcy, the custody fight, the weight of a promise I made to a woman who isn’t here to see it kept. A girl. Whitney’s girl. The daughter Whitney always wanted, the one she talked about in hypotheticals over wine, naming and renaming her, imagining her first steps, her first words, her first day of school. Whitney used to say she’d be the fun mom. The one who lets her daughter eat cake for breakfast on Saturdays and stay up past bedtime to watch shooting stars. The mom Eleanor never was.
And now Whitney’s gone, and the daughter is here, and I’m supposed to fill both roles: the responsible guardian and thefun best friend and the mother and the promise-keeper and provider. But that’s not even the hardest part. The worst is imagining I might not get the opportunity to do any of that, and it’s only right now I realize I want this more than I’ve wanted anything in my whole life. And Eleanor might take it all away.
I grip Saylor’s hand so tightly I must be hurting him, but he doesn’t flinch. He grips back. His thumb moves across my knuckles in that small, automatic circle that has become his way of saying I’m here without interrupting whatever I’m feeling.
Eleanor is watching the screen. Her hand has risen to her mouth. To my shock and slight horror, she’s tearing up. The involuntary response of a grandmother seeing her granddaughter for the first time, and for one unguarded second, Eleanor Montgomery-Trace looks exactly like what she is: a woman who lost her daughter and is looking at the only piece of her that remains. Her eyes are wet. Her posture has softened. The armor, for just a moment, has a crack, and through that crack I can see the mother who failed Whitney and knows it and is terrified of failing again.
I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be spitting on her shoes for the hell she’s put me through, but right now, Eleanor and I have more in common than anyone else in the room. She needs me. I need her. I cross the space between us, and like it or fucking not, I wrap her into a hug. “This is for Whit,” I mumble into her shoulder. “She wouldn’t want us fighting right now. Not during the first time we see her daughter. She’s perfect, Eleanor. This baby is perfect.”
Eleanor hugs back. That in itself is monumental. But when she rubs my back in slow, small circles, it feels eerily maternal. “I hope she looks just like her mother.”
“Me too,” I choke out. “Whitney was so beautiful.”
“She really was,” Eleanor breathes out.
Another second passes. The moment expires. Her hand drops. The armor returns. Eleanor squares her shoulders and adjusts her pearls and becomes, once again, the woman with the strategy and the bourbon-funded intelligence and the smile that cuts.
But I saw it. For one tiny beat, I saw Eleanor resemble something very close to a mom.
The appointment takes another twenty minutes. The technician prints images. Raven asks if the baby has hair yet and the tech explains that it’s too early to tell on ultrasound but some babies are born with a full head. Raven says she hopes the baby gets Whit’s curls and I say nothing because I can’t speak without crying and I’ve decided that I’m out of tears for today. I have a feeling I need to save them for what’s ahead.
In the hallway afterward, Eleanor walks in front. Clicking toward the elevator with all her brisk efficiency like she has big places to be and important things to do. She doesn’t say goodbye. She presses the button, waits, steps inside, and vanishes behind closing doors.
Raven hugs me at the entrance. She smells like cocoa butter and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, which is somehow exactly right. “She’s beautiful, right?” Raven asks. “The baby?”
“So beautiful.”
“I’m going to eat a vegetable tonight. In your honor.”
“That’s all I ask.”
We offer to drive her home, but Raven has friends in the city she wants to see. She walks toward the subway entrance with one hand on her belly and the other on her phone, texting someone, probably her friends that she’s on the way, probably with seventeen exclamation points. Twenty-three years old, carrying a miracle, navigating the world with a competence that I envy and a lightness I’ve forgotten how to carry.
And then it’s just us. Saylor and me. Standing on the sidewalk outside a medical building in Midtown East with printed sonogram photos in my purse and the afternoon sun doing that thing it does in Manhattan where it catches the glass on every building and turns the whole city into a chandelier.
Saylor wraps his hand in mine, effortless. The way you grab someone’s hand when it’s become a reflex rather than a decision.
“So,” he says, and his voice has the careful, playful quality of a man who is about to make a joke because he doesn’t know what else to do. “Just for the record, I want you to know that I was completely out of the room when Raven was getting changed. Eyes averted. Very trustworthy boyfriend material right here. You can put that on the reference sheet.”
I don’t laugh. I try. The muscles in my face attempt the configuration of amusement and fail, and what comes out instead is something closer to a wince.
Saylor stops walking.
He turns to face me. His hands find my shoulders. His eyes move across my face with focused attention, like he’s reading a blueprint, looking for the flaw, the crack, the place where the structure is compromised.
