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I just exist here, tired and scared and finally, finally not alone with it.

“Thank you,” I say, to all three of them, into the quiet.

“You don’t have to thank us,” Sloane says. “This is what we’re here for.”

“I know.” I close my eyes. “I know that now.”

Nine days. Then Theo. Then whatever comes after that — a future I can’t fully picture yet, one that used to feel like it belonged entirely to someone else, and now belongs to me too, whether I’m ready for it or not.

For tonight, at least, I’m not carrying it by myself.

Chapter 29

Margo

Idrive to Boston alone.

Same highway Theo took me down five weeks ago. Same exit signs. The same stretch where the trees open up and the city starts announcing itself in increments. I know this road now. I could probably drive it with my eyes closed at this point, which is a strange thing to know about a road that used to belong entirely to someone else’s life.

I make the drive by myself because June found the clinic, and because I promised her. Some promises you keep even when keeping them means an hour there and an hour back with nobody in the passenger seat to hand you coffee exactly the way you take it. I think about that the whole drive — the specific loneliness of doing something enormous without the person who’s about to become the other half of it. I chose that loneliness. I’m the one who decided he didn’t get to be here for this part.

I don’t let myself think too hard about what that says about me. Not yet. I have an appointment to get to.

Dr. Isabelle Ambrose has kind eyes and the specific unhurried calm of someone who has done exactly this appointment thousands of times and still manages to make each one feel like the only one that matters.

“First prenatal visit,” she says, reading my chart, and I confirm it, and she asks the standard questions — last period, method of contraception, any missed doses — with the practiced ease of someone gathering facts rather than building a case against me.

“I never missed one,” I tell her. “Same time every day. Alarm set. Three years.”

“That’s good to hear. And I believe you.” She doesn’t look up from the chart. Somehow that makes the belief land more genuinely than if she’d made eye contact to deliver it. “I want to be clear about something before we go further, because I find patients carry a lot of guilt into this room that isn’t theirs to carry. The pill is about ninety-nine-point-seven percent effective with perfect use. You’re describing perfect use. That still leaves a margin — a small one, but real — where pregnancy happens anyway. It’s not user error. It’s just where you landed on a curve that was never actually zero.”

“I’ve read the statistics,” I say. “I know it’s not supposed to be my fault. It still feels like it should be.”

“That’s very normal. It’s also not accurate.” She finally looks up. There’s something steady and unbothered in her expression — the specific calm of a person who’s said this exact reassurance to a hundred other frightened twenty-year-olds and means it exactly as much every time. “You did everything right. Bodies aren’t contracts. They don’t always honor the terms.”

The ultrasound happens after, in a dimmer room, the wand cold against my stomach, my eyes on the screen even though I don’t fully know what I’m looking at yet.

Dr. Ambrose is quiet for a moment. Then quieter, the specific pause of someone confirming something before she says it out loud.

“Well,” she says. “There’s your first surprise of the day.”

“What?”

She turns the screen slightly toward me. Points to two distinct shapes, two distinct flickers. “Twins. And identical, from what I’m seeing — one shared placenta, single sac division. That’s actually the rarer of the two kinds.” She glances at my chart again. “Any twins in the family?”

My whole chest goes strange and light and terrified all at once. “I have an identical twin sister.”

“That’s a striking coincidence, then, but I want to be accurate with you — identical twinning isn’t hereditary the way fraternal twinning can be. Fraternal runs in families because some women release more than one egg per cycle, and that tendency can pass down the maternal line. Identical twins happen when a single fertilized egg splits in two, and as far as we understand it, that’s essentially random. It doesn’t run in families in any meaningful, predictable way.” She says it plainly, like she’s explaining a weather pattern. Not the single most disorienting sentence I’ve heard in six weeks of disorienting sentences. “So this isn’t genetics catching up with you. It’s just an extraordinary coincidence — that you’d be an identical twin yourself and now be carrying identical twins of your own.”

I stare at the screen. Two flickers. Two heartbeats, steady and separate. The specific impossible fact of two entire people existing inside my body at once, half of them made of a boy I haven’t told yet.

“Do you want to know the due date?” Dr. Ambrose asks, gentle.

I already know it before she says it out loud. I’ve done this count a hundred times in my head over six weeks, circling the same window. Refusing to let myself land on the specific date, because landing on it would make everything real in a way I wasn’t ready for. But I nod anyway, because I need to hear someone else say it, someone with a medical degree and a calm voice, someone who isn’t me.

“Based on conception dating, I’d put your due date around November fourteenth,” Dr. Ambrose says, checking the screen once more before writing it down. “Though I’ll tell you now — twins have a habit of not waiting for their due date. Average delivery for a twin pregnancy runs closer to thirty-six or thirty-seven weeks rather than forty. So realistically, sometime in late October is more likely than mid-November. We’ll get a much clearer picture as we go.”

November fourteenth. Late October, realistically. It lines up exactly with Charleston. Exactly with the beach. The shell. His hand finding mine without either of us deciding it. Exactly with the version of that weekend I’ve been carrying in my chest as the best days of my entire life, now doubling as the specific dates on which everything else got decided too.