Page 64 of Blueline Baby

“Your wife. Okay. God. I really like the sound of that.”

She takes my hand and starts walking us toward the door of the nursery. “Let’s go home.”

That stops me. “You don’t want to stay here tonight?”

She looks around the empty hallway. “Stay here? Jack, I have nothing here. I don’t have clean clothes. I don’t have a toothbrush. I don’t have anything.”

“I bought toothbrushes.”

She stops walking and turns to stare up at me like I’m joking.

“Two of them,” I say. “They’re in the bathroom. A pink one and a green one.”

I don’t tell her I bought them three weeks ago, the same day I signed the lease, or that the cashier didn’t ask and I explained the whole situation to her anyway.

“Fine,” she says, quieter now. “We can stay here tonight. But we start moving our things in soon, because I refuse to live out of two separate places.” She points a finger at my chest. “Soon, Jack.”

“Soon.” I’ve already got her by the hand, walking her down the hall toward the bedroom, which currently contains a brand-new king-sized bed and nothing else. “Do you want the pink toothbrush or the green one?”

Two minutes later, she plucks the green toothbrush out of my hand and eyes the pink one on the bathroom counter. “You can have the pink one.”

I wake up a few hours later in the dark. I reach over, and she’s not there.

Her side of the mattress is cold, which means she’s been up for a while. I throw the blankets back and follow the dark hallway to the nursery.

She’s standing in front of the empty crib with her arms crossed over her bump.

“Hey.” I keep my voice low so I don’t startle her. “You okay?”

She doesn’t turn around. “I think we need to open the envelope.”

The sealed envelope from the anatomy scan. The one neither of us has looked at. She wanted the surprise and I agreed to wait.

“It’s really bothering me,” she says, and her voice isn’t quite steady. “Not knowing. I keep thinking about how we’re supposed to plan any of this when we don’t even know who’s coming. And you picked every single thing in this room in blue, and what if your ‘elite instincts’ are wrong and we have to redo the entire⁠—”

“Hey. Hey.” I step up behind her and put both hands on her shoulders, and she leans her weight back against my chest. “Come here. Breathe for a second.”

“I’m serious, Jack. Let’s just open it. Right now. Then we’ll know.”

She’s asking the wrong guy because I’ve never once in my life chosen not to know something. And I’ve definitely never waited for a single thing I could have right now.

But I turn her around by the shoulders so she has to look up at me in the dark.

“Remember in the truck,” I say. “When I begged you to let something be a surprise?”

“I know,” she whispers. “But all I can think is, what if we decide we want to be surprised, and then the baby is born, and it’s a girl, and you’re secretly disappointed?”

“Disappointed.” The laugh is out before I can stop it. “Chlo, there’s no universe where I’m standing in a delivery room looking at our kid and feeling disappointed. You think I actually want a boy? I’ve been saying boy for weeks because you make the crankiest face in the world every time I bring up Russell. If it’s a girl, I’m finished. I’ll be worse. I’ll be the guy who can’t tell a four-year-old no. I’ll sit on the floor and paint her toenails and play tea party, and I will fight every kid on the playground who looks at her wrong.”

She laughs, small and shaky against my chest. I’ve got her listening now, so I keep going.

“And look, here’s the other thing. Okay. This is going to sound cocky.”

“You? Never.”

“I’m serious. I’ve never been surprised. Not really, not once. I knew I was getting drafted before anybody said it out loud. I knew which women at the bar were going to say yes before I crossed the room. Every one of them, for years. Then you told me no in about four seconds, which, well, that was new.” She huffs against my chest. “I know when a puck’s going in the second it leaves my stick. I know when I’ve missed before the goalie even reacts. Everything that’s ever come to me, I saw it coming from a mile out.”

I tip her chin up so her eyes meet mine in the dim light.