Seventeen
Harper
By twenty weeks, there is absolutely no hiding it anymore. The oversized jumpers. The strategically placed handbags. None of it works. My stomach has officially crossed the line from "She ate too much pasta" to "Congratulations are probably appropriate."
I smooth a hand over the curve of it anyway. Habit, mostly. Or denial. Hard to tell. Leo, meanwhile, is halfway through explaining why a Brachiosaurus would've needed a heart roughly the size of a small hatchback.
"…because otherwise the blood wouldn't make it all the way up to its head."
"Mmm."
"It’s true."
"I believe you."
"You weren't listening."
"I was listening."
"You weren't."
"I heard 'heart'."
"And?"
"…Dinosaur?"
He sighs the long-suffering sigh of an eight-year-old burdened with a severely disappointing mother.
"I'll explain it again."
"How lucky for me."
He's still talking when I check my handbag for the fourth time. Referral. Medicare card. Phone. Lip balm. Keys. I zip it closed. Immediately unzip it again. Pregnancy has apparently unlocked a brand-new type of anxiety where I become convinced I've forgotten something every three minutes.
My phone buzzes.
Alexander: Running five minutes early. Also…I have coffee.
I smile despite myself. Three months ago, coffee would've meant a triple-shot flat white. Now it means decaf. Because somewhere along the way, Alexander simply noticed the change in my drink order and started pre-empting my needs.
He remembers which yoghurt makes me nauseous.
Which side of the bed I sleep on. (not that he has slept over…
much) He remembers that peppermint tea settles my stomach.
That I pretend I'm fine when I'm overwhelmed.
Little things. The sort of things I didn't even realise I'd stopped expecting someone to notice. The front door opens a minute later.
"Morning."
He appears carrying two takeaway cups and a paper bag. Leo looks up immediately.
"Did you know a baby's heart beats nearly twice as fast as ours?" Alexander doesn't even hesitate.
"I didn't." Leo nods, pleased that his genius has been recognised.
"I thought not." Alexander sets my coffee in front of me before turning back to Leo with complete seriousness.
"So…"
"How fast is the heart?"
I watch them disappear into a very earnest discussion about cardiovascular systems while I cradle my coffee between both hands.
It's… normal. Wonderfully, beautifully normal.
No awkwardness. No one is trying too hard.
No one is wondering whose turn it is to speak.
Alexander doesn't treat Leo like an obstacle.
Leo doesn't treat Alexander like a replacement.
They're just… Finding their own way. Naturally.
It makes something in my chest ache in the nicest possible way.
"Ready?" Alexander asks, looking over at me. I nod in response.
"As ready as someone voluntarily lying on another medieval torture table can be." He smiles.
"I'll take that as a yes." I sling my bag over my shoulder. Then stop.
"…Referral." Alexander raises an eyebrow at me, used to my antics by now.
"I am sure that you already checked it about four times."
"I may have."
"You've still got it then."
"I know.” But then I pause again "…I'm going to check anyway."
He laughs as I pull the folded piece of paper out for a fifth inspection.
"I'll add obsessive bag checking to the list of pregnancy symptoms."
"It should be a recorded symptom for sure."
"It probably is somewhere on an official document." Leo groans dramatically.
"Can we go before Mum checks it again?" I glare at him.
"I heard that."
"I wanted you to."
Alexander chuckles, takes my hand as we head towards the front door, and for a moment… Despite the nerves. It almost feels like this has always been our normal.
The obstetrician’s office is an advertisement for calm.
The walls are painted in a shade of grey that contains hints of blue and I am sure was suggested by a therapist somewhere to encourage relaxation and trust. The chairs are arranged in symmetrical rows, upholstered in a beige so determinedly neutral that it feels like a dare, sit in me, I promise you’ll feel nothing.
There’s a fish tank that dominates one wall of the waiting room, a low-slung, softly lit rectangle filled with orange and white fish that orbit plastic coral in slow, resigned circles.
Leo makes a beeline for it, parking himself inches from the glass, his backpack still on and both hands jammed in his pockets.
I check in at the front desk, hand over the referral, spell my last name twice, and then retreat to the chair closest to the tank. Alexander settles into the seat next to me, stretching one leg out and scanning the room.
I sneak a glance at the waiting room population.
There is a couple with a toddler dismantling a wooden puzzle at a toddler-sized table; a woman in a windbreaker, flipping through an ancient issue of New Idea, a man who may or may not be sleeping, his chin tilted so far forward that his head seems held on by sheer will alone.
Leo stands, motionless, studying the slow drift of a fish with a black spot on its tail. After a minute, he presses one finger to the glass and whispers, “That’s you, buddy. Outrun them all.”
Alexander leans in, voice pitched for my ears only. “He’s named them all. The orange one is apparently Gerald.”
I don’t look away from Leo. “He names everything. He named our vacuum cleaner.”
“Did he?”
“Keith.”
Alexander nods, accepting this as the most reasonable thing in the world. “I’d trust a Keith with floor maintenance.”
I glance at him sideways. “He takes it very seriously. The vacuuming.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
We lapse into silence and I rest the appointment folder on my knees, pick at the corner of the paper, and scan the room again.
The woman with the magazine is now staring directly at the fish tank, her mouth set in a thin, hard line.
The couple at the puzzle table are bent low, foreheads nearly touching as they try to reconstruct a wooden dinosaur.
The man with the fragile neck snores once, then catches himself and straightens up.
I find myself staring at the carpet instead. Tiny squares in varying shades of taupe and blue, all lined up with military precision. I wonder who laid it. More importantly, I wonder who approved the budget for something so boring. My brain wanders the way it always does when I'm nervous.
Waiting rooms. I've spent far too much of my life in them. With Ethan. With Leo. As a kid, with Mum and my little sister, where silence wasn't just encouraged, it was practically a competitive sport.
The thought catches me off guard. Freya. I haven't spoken to her in… God. Months. Not really. Not since everything with Ethan exploded. Guilt settles heavily in my stomach, somehow managing to compete with the baby for space. I should have told her.
She would've driven here without a second thought. Wrapped me in one of her impossibly gentle hugs. Probably cried harder than I did. And that's exactly why I didn't. Freya has always loved people with her whole heart.
Telling her what Ethan did wouldn't just break mine. It would break hers too. So, I did what any emotionally mature, bestselling romance author would do. I avoided the problem entirely. Denial. It's not just a river in Egypt. Apparently it's also my preferred communication strategy.
The receptionist calls my name, her voice sweet and unhurried.
Leo turns from the tank, his face lit up with an earnestness that nearly knocks me sideways. “Is it time? Is it the heartbeat part?”
I smile. “It’s the heartbeat part.”
He slips his hand into mine with a seriousness that I haven’t seen since the first time he realized hospitals could give you both bad news and a sticker on the way out.
Alexander stands, offering his arm in a gesture so old-fashioned that I almost laugh.
But I take it anyway, letting the warmth of his arm settle under my palm and calm my nerves as we follow the nurse down the hallway, past doors labelled with words like Consultation and Ultrasound and Specimen Drop-Off.
Leo walks in front, as if he is afraid of missing something if he isn’t there first.
The ultrasound room is dim, the kind of blue-black lighting usually reserved for planetariums and police interrogations. It smells faintly of antiseptic.
The sonographer introduces herself. A tall mid-forties woman, straight brown hair with a single streak of purple, and a lanyard absolutely drowning in enamel pins (space shuttle, rainbow, what might be a smiling uterus).
She gives Leo a conspiratorial smile and says, “You’re in charge of holding this,” then hands him a laminated picture book about animals with x-rays inside.
Leo takes it with the seriousness of a kid who has just been assigned critical NASA launch duty. He stands at my left shoulder, feet planted, with his eyes laser-locked on the monitor.
Alexander claims the chair at my right, scooting close enough that I can feel the warmth of his leg against mine. He doesn’t hold my hand, doesn’t try to fix or manage or absorb my nerves. He just stays present, patient and quiet, like a weighted blanket for my soul.
“Okay, shirt up and pants just a little lower,” the sonographer says, and for a second, I feel twelve again, humiliated by the idea of anyone seeing my stomach, even now, even after pregnancy and childbirth and half a decade of medical indignities. I oblige, then prop myself onto my elbows.
The paper crunches under my back. There is no preamble; the sonographer snaps on gloves, grabs a bottle, and squirts gel onto my belly that is so cold it almost makes me yelp.
I manage, “You ever consider warming that stuff up first?”
She grins, adjusting the probe. “I hear that a lot.”
She presses the probe into the gel. Instantly, the screen crackles to life, a static blizzard resolving into blurry shapes and movement.