Chapter 276: Jake
I swear the room shrinks the second her dress comes up and the blanket settles low on her hips, because all I can see is the curve of her, round and warm and unbelievably ours, the thin white seam of the old stab wound arcing across the swell like a pale crescent—wrong on principle, sacred in practice, because it means she lived and now there’s life underneath it.
She keeps saying she’s too big for “just over halfway,” and Reid and I keep telling her that’s because we feed her like a tiny queen or because clearly I manufacture giant babies and Reid is an enabler, and she rolls those sea-glass eyes and tells us to behave while her fingers find mine and hold tight anyway.
Normally we take turns at appointments—one of us stays back so we don’t overwhelm the front desk with paperwork and pronouns and the part where we’re both in this for life—but for this one there was no universe where either of us stayed home. First picture. First proof. First listen.
The technician breezes in with a practiced smile and sensible shoes, says hi to all three of us like she’s decided not to ask questions today, and squeezes gel onto the wand. Madeline sucks in a breath—“Cold”—and Reid’s entire posture tilts toward her like his body can heat the room if he hates the gel enough.
The wand touches skin. The screen lights.
And the tech actually gasps.
It’s small—half a sound she catches behind her teeth—but Reid hears it, I hear it, and Madeline’s fingers clamp around mine hard enough to make bone talk.
“What?” I ask, too fast.
The woman’s face melts into a grin before I can apologize for snapping. She looks at me, at Reid, then back to Madeline like she’s about to hand us a secret we won’t know how to hold. “Well,” she says, warm and steady, “that very round belly makes perfect sense. There are two little babies in here.”
For a heartbeat I don’t process English. The screen is a galaxy of grayscale, a storm of shapes I don’t know how to read—and then the tech angles the probe, breathes, and there it is: a flicker, and another flicker. Two. Two separate, insistently living heartbeats that make a sound like a stadium of hummingbirds, and I don’t realize I’m swaying until Reid’s hand hits my shoulder, anchoring, and I hear my own laugh break wet and stupid in my throat.
“Twins,” Madeline whispers, like the word itself might shatter. Her eyes are huge and shining and she looks from the screen to us and back like she needs confirmation from all three sources of her reality. “We’re having twins?”
“Of course we are,” Reid says hoarsely, and the way his mouth almost smiles wrecks me. “We don’t do anything halfway.”
The tech starts narrating in that gentle, competent cadence people use to guide you across thin ice. “Two sacs, two heartbeats, both measuring beautifully… here’s Baby A,” she says, sliding and tilting to catch the profile—round skull, little button nose, a hand that floats up like a wave—“and here’s Baby B,” another slide, another profile, smaller maybe by a hair, a foot flexing, a spine that looks like a string of pearls. “See them? Heads together. Like they’re conspiring.”
Madeline laughs and cries at the same time. Reid has both his palms on her knee, thumbs moving in thoughtless circles, and I can’t stop touching her either—braiding our fingers, flattening my hand over the slope of her belly as if I could memorize the exact coordinates where the sound came from.
The room becomes this gentle chorus, the tech measuring and clicking, the machine singing that wild fast rhythm, me asking idiot questions I already know the answer to because my brain is soup. “Are they okay? They’re okay?” I keep saying, and the tech keeps smiling. “They’re beautiful,” she keeps repeating. “They’re strong. They’re perfect.”
“Can you tell…” Madeline trails off and blushes, because even now she’s shy about asking for the big news.
“Sometimes I can,” the tech says, angling, pausing, chasing shy limbs, “sometimes the little ones are modest. Let’s see.” She chases Baby A, who obligingly uncrosses long legs and gives us a view that makes the tech huff a laugh. “That one,” she says, tapping the screen, “is very proud to be a boy.”
Reid makes a noise that could be a prayer or a curse. I have to bend and press my forehead to the side of Madeline’s belly because if I don’t I’m going to do something humiliating like fist-pump in a medical setting.
“And Baby B…” The probe glides. Our second little constellation rolls, flips, tucks a hand under their chin like a thinker. “There,” the tech breathes, triumphant and soft. “That is a little girl.”
A son. A daughter. Two names detonate in my chest, two futures stack on top of each other like a hand of cards, and I swear I can feel our lives pivot on a pin—everything after aligned in a brighter direction.
Madeline laughs again, helpless, watery. “A boy and a girl,” she says, staring at the screen like she can drink it with her eyes. “Hi, babies.” Her voice goes even softer. “I’m your mom.”
We watch them move. Baby A kicks and Baby B pokes back and the tech prints a row of grainy black-and-white pictures like tiny holy cards and hands them to us with the kind of ceremony I didn’t know printers deserved. There’s one where they really are head-to-head, foreheads almost touching, like they’re telling secrets we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to overhear.
When the gel is wiped away and her dress smoothed back down, I help Madeline sit up and she presses the photos to her chest like a bouquet. “Two,” she whispers, eyes on fire, and then she looks at us like she’s measuring how far she can fall. “Are you… happy?”
Reid laughs, a raw, destroyed sound, and kisses her knee through the cotton. I take her face in both hands and kiss the tip of her nose because if I kiss her mouth I won’t stop. “Trouble,” I say, and it comes out wrecked, “I don’t have a word for what I am.”
She smiles the smile that unthreads me, and I rest my palm on that strong, round curve where two wild little heartbeats are knocking and think: of course it’s twins. Of course we get double. Of course our life was always going to be bigger than we knew.