Page 30 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

She was so active it worried me sometimes, in a good way—if that made sense. Like her whole personality was already loud and impatient, and she hadn’t even gotten here yet. I loved feeling her move. I loved it in a way that made me feel guilty half the time, because feeling that kind of joy meant I wasn’t thinking, in that exact second, about the fact that there used to be two heartbeats on that screen, and now there was one.

I still did the math sometimes, even though I’d told myself to stop. One instead of two. I’d gotten better at not doing it in front of people. I hadn’t gotten better at not doing it at all.

“Truth?” The nurse held the door open. “She’s ready for you.”

Dr. Broussard had her hands on my belly, measuring, murmuring numbers to herself before she said them out loud for the chart. My daughter picked that exact moment to roll like she was trying to get comfortable in a room that had gotten too small for her.

“She’s a mover,” Dr. Broussard said, smiling a little.

“She never stops,” I said. “I love it. And then I feel bad for loving it, which is its own whole thing.”

Dr. Broussard didn’t rush past that. She set the doppler down and looked at me the way she did when she wanted me to know she was actually listening and not just being polite.

“Why do you feel bad?”

“Because loving how alive she is feels like it’s forgetting him a little. Like every time I get excited about her kicking, I’m not thinking about the fact that there used to be two of them in here.” I shrugged, even though nothing about it felt like a shrug. “I know that’s not how it works. I know grief and joy aren’t supposed to cancel out. I just—some days the joy feels like betrayal.”

“It’s not betrayal,” she said. “It’s not even close to betrayal. You’re allowed to be thrilled about the daughter you’re going to hold and still carry the son you didn’t get to. Those aren’t in competition. They just both live in you at the same time.” She capped her pen. “The women who worry me are the ones who don’t feel guilty at all. That usually means they’ve shut something off instead of working through it. You’re working through it. That’s harder, but it’s better.”

I nodded, throat tight. “It’s still hard.”

“It’s supposed to be hard,” she said. “I’d be more concerned if it wasn’t.”

We talked through the rest of it—her position, my iron levels, the fact that I was measuring right on track and she was head-down already, which Dr. Broussard said was a good sign this early. Normal appointment things. I left feeling lighter than I had going in, which had become the whole point of coming here. Not fixed. Just lighter.

I stopped at a boutique on my way home, one of the little shops that sold nothing but baby clothes in a space smaller than my old bedroom, and let myself get lost in a rack of tiny dresses for longer than I needed to. Girls’ clothes had become my thing lately. I couldn’t walk past a display of little bows or smocked rompers without picking something up. My closet at Amai’s house had a section now that was entirely hers, color-coded, folded the way I used to fold my own clothes before I stopped having the energy to care about my own clothes.

The woman ringing me up folded a yellow sundress into tissue paper and smiled at me the way people did now, warm and a little too careful.

“First baby?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

It came out easily. It always came out easy. That was the part that got me—how simple the lie was to tell, how it required nothing from me at all except one syllable. But it sat in my chest the whole walk back to the car like something with an edge on it, and I didn’t try to talk myself out of that feeling. I just let it be there, the way Dr. Broussard had taught me to let things be there instead of shoving them down. It was hard.

When I got home, bags in both hands, I could hear him before I saw him.

“Muthafuckin’—no. No, that ain’t—” A pause. A thud. “Who in the hell wrote these instructions, a damn scientist?”

I found Amai in the middle of the nursery floor, surrounded by crib parts like a crime scene, a tiny Allen wrench in one hand and a look on his face like he was about to break all that shit.

I put the bags down by the door and just watched him for a second, because it was genuinely one of the funniest things I’d seen him do since I’d known him. Amai Landry, a man who once explained to me a method of getting rid of a body with the same tone most people used to explain a recipe, sitting cross-legged on a nursery rug, losing a fight with a piece of Swedish furniture.

“Baby,” I said, laughing, “it’s not that hard.”

“It is that hard.” He held up the instruction sheet like evidence. “This shit reads like you putting together a damn house.”

I walked over, dropped beside him, and ran my fingers through his hair. He leaned into it without thinking, the way he always did lately, like his body knew what he wanted before his mouth caught up.

“You want help?”

“I don’t need help.” He grabbed a different bolt, squinted at it, and set it back down exactly where it had been. “I’m putting my daughter’s bed together my damn self, thank you very much.”

“You’ve been on that same side since I got home.”

“You worried about the wrong thing.”

“Oh, really?”