Chapter 103 Halfway
The twenty-week scan fell on a Friday morning when the sky was the flat white of February clouds sitting too low to go anywhere.
I had been awake since five. Not from discomfort. Not from the baby, who had been quiet all night in the particular settled stillness I had started to recognize as sleep. I was awake because twenty weeks felt like a door and I was standing in front of it not quite ready to knock.
Halfway.
I lay in the dark and counted things the way I used to count exits. The kicks I had felt this week. The times Lycian had pressed his ear against my stomach and claimed he could hear something, which was not medically possible, and which I did not point out because his face when he did it was something I wanted to keep. The mornings I had stood in the nursery doorway just looking at the room we had built for someone we hadn’t met.
Lycian woke up twenty minutes after me. I knew the exact moment because his breathing changed and then his hand found my stomach in the dark without him saying anything, the automatic reaching of someone whose sleeping habits had quietly reorganized themselves around another person.
“You’ve been awake for a while,” he said.
“Twenty minutes, Longer than that.”
I didn’t argue.
He pulled me closer. My back against his chest. His arm warm across me. The room was still dark and the house was quiet and outside the February wind moved through the garden in slow irregular gusts, pressing against the window and releasing.
“It’s going to be fine,” he said.
“I know.”
“Then why are you cataloguing the ceiling?”
I turned over to face him. Could just make out his face in the grey pre-dawn light, the particular expression he wore when he was awake enough to be honest but still soft from sleep.
“What if something has changed since the last scan,” I said. “What if something looks different and aunt Clara has to tell us something we weren’t expecting?”
He looked at me for a moment. Not dismissing it. Not telling me I was being irrational. Just sitting with what I had said the way he sat with things that mattered.
“Then we deal with it,” he said. “Together. Whatever it is.” His hand moved slowly against my back. “But I don’t think that’s what today is.”
I pressed my forehead against his chest.
He held me until the room went from grey to pale and the heating clicked on and somewhere outside a bird started up its single repeated note in the bare tree by the fence.
Aunt Clara arrived at nine with her bag and the quiet efficiency that always made the room feel calmer just by her being in it. She set up in the spare room. The lavender of her hand cream. The clean sharp smell underneath it. The monitor hums to life on the small table.
I lay down. Lifted my shirt. Closed my eyes for the cold gel and it was still cold even though she said sorry every time.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lycian said, from directly beside me, his hand already in mine.
The heartbeat filled the room.
I had heard it four times now and it still stopped my breath every single time. Fast and rhythmic and full of itself, going about its work with total indifference to how much it undid me.
“Perfect,” Clara said. Moving the wand slowly. Her eyes were on the screen. Her voice was calm and even and meaning it. “Absolutely perfect. Growth is exactly where it should be. Heart looks great. All four chambers are developing normally.” She paused, tilting the screen. “Spine looks wonderful. Brain development on track.”
I exhaled. Long and slow. Felt the tension leaving my shoulders in a wave I hadn’t known was there until it went.
Lycian’s thumb moved across my knuckles.
“Look at this,” Clara said, angling the screen toward us.
The baby was moving. Not just a kick or a shift. Full movement, arms and legs going, turning in the warm dark like they had somewhere important to be and were taking their time getting there. I could see the curve of their back. The round of their head. The way their hands kept drifting up near their face the way babies did, like they were thinking about something.
“They’re so big,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.
“Twenty weeks,” Clara said warmly. “About the size of a small banana. Though I’d say this one is measuring slightly ahead.” She moved the wand again. “Strong. Active. Very comfortable.”
I watched the screen. Watched my baby move in the grey flickering light of the monitor. Watched the hands and the curve of the spine and the small definite beating of the heart visible in the chest cavity, that fast bright flutter that meant everything was working, everything was doing what it was supposed to do.
Lycian made a sound beside me. Not a word. Just something low and quiet that he let out like he hadn’t meant to, the sound of someone whose feelings had gotten ahead of their composure.
I turned my head to look at him.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were bright and fixed on the screen and he was blinking more than usual, slow deliberate blinks, the kind that meant he was holding something back with effort.
I squeezed his hand.
He squeezed back hard. Did not look away from the screen.
Clara finished the measurements quietly, talking through each one, writing things in her notes. Everything normal. Everything good. Everything exactly where it should be at twenty weeks in a pregnancy that had started under impossible circumstances and was somehow, against all the odds that had stacked themselves against us over the past year, going exactly right.
After she left I lay on the spare room table for a moment longer than necessary with my shirt still pushed up and my hands resting on my stomach. The gel was drying and the room smelled like lavender and the monitor was off but I could still hear the heartbeat in the way you keep hearing a sound after it stops.
Lycian sat on the edge of the table beside me. Not standing over me. Just beside me, at the same level, his hip against mine.
He put his hand flat on my stomach.
I covered it with both of mine.
The baby kicked once. Firm and deliberate. Right in the center of his palm.
He laughed. Quiet and sudden and completely real, the laugh that came from somewhere he didn’t edit, the one that always surprised him slightly when it came out.
I watched his face in the pale February light coming through the window. The way the laugh settled into a smile that stayed. The way he looked down at my stomach with an expression I had no single word for because it contained too many things at once.
This man had walked into a charity gala and ruined my plan to disappear quietly through an entire semester. Had offered me a deal I had laughed at and then accepted because I had no other options. Had stood between me and every terrible thing that came after, not because it was his duty, not because of the bond, but because somewhere in the middle of a fake relationship built on desperation he had chosen me. Kept choosing me. Was choosing me still, every morning, every quiet evening, every scan in a spare room on a February Friday.
Twenty weeks, halfway to the rest of our lives.