“Are you…hoping?” he asked hesitantly.
There was something odd in his tone that made me look up at him quizzically.
He shrugged. “When Amy was born, I remember my dad ranting about how useless girls were. He was so sure he would only have boys because of his virility or whatever. My mom cried. It would have been better if they had found out earlier and to give him a few months to adjust, instead of when she was cut open on the operating table in an emergency c-section.”
I rubbed my belly. “Someday,” I muttered, “I am going to meet your dad and we will havewords.”
He snorted. “Chloe, you willnevermeet him. I love you too much for that.”
I kept rubbing my belly, thinking about what was inside.Whowas inside. It was hard to imagine. “Is it weird that I can’t picture either a boy or a girl? In some ways, I’m still stuck on thinking this can’t be real.” I looked up at him. “I want to know.I don’t care what I’m having, but I think knowing will help me feel connected in some way.”
The technician came in and squirted goo on my belly. He dragged the transducer across my belly, pushing harder than I expected but not so hard that it was painful, and an image appeared on the screen.
“There you go,” he said. “There’s your baby.”
I couldn’t speak as I stared at the screen. Big head, little body with its knees drawn up, tiny hands and feet, adorable baby features. Everything swirled together like images in a kaleidoscope as wetness flooded my eyes.
That’s my baby.
He didn’t say much as he kept moving the transducer. Sometimes he drew a line across a various body part like a tape measure. Time floated by in a haze. I couldn’t look away from the screen.
“All right,” he said finally, standing. He handed me some wipes to clean the gel from my belly. “Dr. Davidson will be in to go over everything. I took a couple pictures that you can take home with you.”
I blinked, dazed. “Thank you.”
Steven looked every bit as dazed as I felt.
“All right,” Dr. Davidson said, bustling in. “Everything looks great. Congratulations, Chloe. You have a perfectly healthy baby in there. Do you want to know the sex?”
I nodded.
Her smile widened. “It’s a boy.”
“You hungry?”Steven asked for the third time, his fingertips beating out a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel.
“No,” I said, also for the third time. In the silence that had stretched between us, I had lost my appetite.
Other than asking me if I was hungry, Steven hadn’t said a word since we left the doctor’s office. At first I’d been too excited at seeing a real baby-shaped image on the screen to notice Steven getting quieter and quieter. He had stopped talking altogether sometime around when Dr. Davidson announced I was having a boy.
And there he was on the screen, a real boy looking very much like a human baby instead of a splotch. It was suddenly all so very real.
Maybe that was the problem.
Maybe it had suddenly become real for Steven, too.
And maybe…maybe he wasn’t ready for that. And maybe I should have expected as much. We had gone from enemies to being roommates to being in love in only five months, and in another four months I was going to be a mother to another man’s son. That was…a lot to process.
“Hey.” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hey. We should talk.”
His gaze whipped to mine and then back to the road. His lips pressed in a grim line. “All right.”
My mouth went completely dry. I couldn’t even get a squeak out.
“Chloe.” His jaw ticked. “Say it.”
I licked my lips nervously. “You know that day outside Jo’s, when I spilled my coffee and you bought me a new one? I was pregnant and I didn’t even know it.”
“Okay,” he said slowly.
