17. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
The waiting room at my OB’s office is painted a soothing shade of sage green that’s probably supposed to be calming but just makes me feel vaguely nauseous. Or maybe that’s the pregnancy. Hard to tell these days. Everything below the neck is a committee now, and the committee votes nauseous a lot.
Around us, the room is full of couples. Real ones.
A man rubbing his wife’s shoulders in the corner, another reading a parenting magazine upside down without noticing, a pair by the window arguing softly and happily about paint colors.
To every one of them, Griffin and I look identical, a nervous husband and his pregnant wife, and the assumption sits on us like a coat that used to fit.
Griffin is sitting next to me, his knee bouncing nervously, his eyes fixed on the door that leads to the examination rooms. He showed up thirty minutes early, just like he said he would, wearing a button-down shirt and actual dress pants like this is a business meeting instead of a doctor’s appointment, and when I walked in he stood up so fast the magazines slid off the little table, and then he picked up every single one and re-fanned them like a display before he sat back down.
I don’t know if I find that endearing or annoying.
Probably both, which has been the general state of things since the signing.
Two weeks of polite texts, appointment logistics, a delivery of ginger tea left at my door with no note, because a note would have been a move and he isn’t making moves.
He’s just orbiting, careful and constant, close enough to be useful and far enough to be blameless.
Twice, the receptionist has glanced over at him, then at me, then done the small smile people do at expectant fathers who care this much.
I want to correct her. I want to say, we’re divorced, actually, it’s complicated, he’s here on a provisional basis.
I don’t say anything. The truth needs a flowchart.
“You’re making me dizzy,” I say, nodding at his bouncing knee.
He stops immediately. “Sorry. I’m just…” He scrubs a hand over his jaw. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Neither have I, shockingly enough.”
“Right. Of course. I just meant…” He stops, takes a breath, and I watch him physically decline the impulse to fill the air with charm.
The old version of this man would have had the nurse laughing and the receptionist bringing him coffee by now.
This one rations his words like a man on a budget, terrified of spending the wrong one, and just sits in the uncomfortable chair being uncomfortable, on purpose, like penance. “I’m nervous.”
“I can tell.”
“Is that… is that okay? That I’m nervous?”
I look at him sideways. Two weeks ago this man signed away our marriage with a shaking hand, and now he’s asking whether his feelings are allowed in the building.
The carefulness should be satisfying. Mostly it makes me sad in a complicated direction I don’t have the energy to map.
“Are you asking for my permission to have emotions?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” He laughs, a tight sound. “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do here, Hannah. How I’m supposed to act. I don’t want to overstep or make you uncomfortable or…”
“Griffin.”
“Yeah?”
“Just be here. That’s all I’m asking.”
He nods, swallowing hard. “I can do that. I can definitely do that.” A pause.
“I brought a notebook. In case there are things to remember. Measurements, or instructions, or…” He pulls a small black notebook out of his jacket pocket, and it’s already half full, pages of his handwriting, and he catches my expression and puts it away fast, like he’s been caught cheating on a test. “Too much?”
“Borderline.”
“I’ll dial it back.”
God help me, I almost smile.
The door opens and a nurse appears. “Hannah Bloom?”
I start to stand, and Griffin jumps up so fast he nearly knocks over the chair next to him. The nurse, a middle-aged woman with kind eyes, looks between us with barely concealed amusement.
“Dad coming too?”
“Yes,” Griffin says quickly. “If that’s okay. Is that okay?”
She glances at me. I nod.
“Of course,” she says. “Right this way.”
The examination room is small and dim, the only light coming from the glow of the ultrasound monitor, and Griffin stations himself in the corner by my head with the precision of a man who researched where the father is supposed to stand and is executing the diagram.
He probably did. There’s probably a tab for it.
I change into the paper gown and lie back on the table, trying to ignore the awkwardness of having Griffin in the room while I’m half-naked under a sheet.
“Cold,” I warn when she squirts the gel onto my stomach.
“Always is,” she agrees. “The doctor will be in shortly, but let’s see if we can get a good look while we wait.”
She presses the wand to my belly and the screen comes to life.
For a moment, it’s just gray static and swirling shapes. Then she adjusts the angle, and suddenly…
A heartbeat.
Rapid and strong, filling the room with its rhythm, faster than a grown heart, urgent, industrious, like she’s got somewhere to be. It’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. It’s barely a sound at all. It rearranges every priority I have in the space of three beats.
“There we go,” the nurse says, smiling. “Strong heartbeat. Looking good.”
I can see her now. The curve of her head, the small body curled in on itself, the tiny limbs that twitch and move as we watch.
She’s real. She’s alive. She’s right there on the screen, my daughter, our daughter, twelve centimeters of person we made back when I still believed we were forever, and I can’t breathe.
All the pregnancy apps in the world, all the size-of-a-lemon, size-of-an-avocado emails, and none of it prepared me for the fact of her, moving, insisting, existing.
Next to me, Griffin makes a sound.
I turn my head and see tears streaming down his face.
He’s not trying to hide them. He’s not embarrassed or self-conscious. He’s just sitting there, staring at the screen, crying openly while the nurse pretends not to notice.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. Not to me. To the screen, to the baby, to the tiny person we made together. “I’m so sorry I almost missed this.”
Something cracks in my chest.
I’ve been so careful. So guarded. Walls up, armor on, heart locked away where it can’t be hurt again. I’ve spent the last three months convincing myself that I’m over him, that I don’t need him, that alone is safer than whatever he was offering.
But watching him now, falling apart over our daughter’s heartbeat, being exactly the father I always wanted him to be, I feel those walls start to crumble.
I reach out.
I don’t decide to. There’s no moment where I weigh it, no column of pros and cons. I take his hand where it rests on the arm of his chair before I can talk myself out of it. His fingers close around mine immediately, desperately, like I’m the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth.
“She’s perfect,” he breathes.
“We don’t know it’s a she yet,” I point out, but my voice is softer than I intended.
“I know.” He looks at the screen, then at me, his eyes red-rimmed and raw and completely open. “I just have a feeling.” He says it with the same quiet certainty he once used to call market shifts before anyone else saw them, and he was always right about those too, which I hate.
The nurse clears her throat. “Well, let’s see if your feeling is right, shall we?” She adjusts the wand, searching for a better angle. “Let’s see… yes, there we go. Congratulations, Mom and Dad. It’s a girl.”
A girl.
We’re having a daughter. Somewhere in my chest a door I didn’t know about swings open onto a whole country: pigtails and scraped knees and first days of school, a small fierce person with his stubbornness and my spine, God help the world.
Griffin’s hand tightens around mine, and I let him hold on, just for this moment, in this dark room where the usual rules are suspended, where we aren’t a divorce with a custody schedule pending, where we’re just two terrified people watching proof that they made a person.
Just while we watch our daughter’s heartbeat flutter on the screen.
“I’m going to do better,” he says quietly. “I know I don’t deserve another chance. I know I haven’t earned your trust. But I’m going to do better. For her. For you. Even if you never forgive me.”
I should pull my hand away. I should remind him that this doesn’t change anything. That we’re co-parents, not partners. That he lost the right to hold my hand when he gave Julie Myer credit for my life’s work.
Instead, I watch our daughter swim in the soft static of the ultrasound screen.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” I finally say, and we both hear everything underneath it, the after-this-projects, the we’ll-trys, the two years of tomorrows. He doesn’t flinch away from it. He takes it looking at me, which is new.
“I won’t.” His thumb brushes over my knuckles, feather-light. “Not anymore.”
We sit there in the dark, connected by our joined hands and the life we’re creating together, and it occurs to me, distantly, that this is the first time we’ve touched since the porch.
Two months of careful choreography, of handing off folders without fingers brushing, of standing on opposite sides of doorways, undone in one second by a heartbeat on a screen.
For the first time in months, I let myself feel a thing other than angry.
I don’t know what it is yet. Maybe I don’t want to know.
The doctor comes in a few minutes later, a no-nonsense woman in her fifties with gray-streaked hair and a brisk, efficient manner. She confirms what the nurse already told us: the baby is healthy, developing normally, right on track for her due date.
“Any questions?” she asks, looking between us.
“A million,” Griffin says, and the notebook is out again, pen ready, the CEO of a billion-dollar company sitting in a paper-curtained exam room prepared to take dictation from a woman in sensible shoes. “But I don’t know where to start.”
The doctor almost smiles. “That’s normal for first-time parents. My advice? Don’t read too many books. They’ll just make you paranoid. Trust your instincts. Call the office if anything seems wrong. And try to get some sleep now, because you won’t get any after she arrives.”
“Encouraging,” I mutter, and Griffin actually writes it down, whatever it was, sleep now, and I catch the doctor watching him with the particular warmth medical professionals reserve for fathers who show their work, and something in me wants to stand up and explain the whole history, object to the warmth, enter the launch speech into evidence.
I stay quiet. Let him have the warmth. The record and I know what we know.
“I’m a realist.” She pats my knee. “You’re doing great, Mom. Both of you are. I’ll see you in four weeks.”
She leaves, and I’m left alone with Griffin in the dim examination room. The ultrasound screen is dark now, our daughter’s image gone, but I can still see her when I close my eyes. The curve of her head. The flutter of her heartbeat.
“I should let you get dressed,” Griffin says, standing awkwardly. “I’ll just… I’ll wait outside.”
“Griffin.”
He pauses at the door. “Yeah?”
“Thank you. For being here.”
He turns back, and his face is so full of emotion it hurts to look at. “Thank you for letting me.”
He leaves, and I stare at the ceiling awhile before reaching for my clothes.
I get dressed slowly, my hands not quite steady, and when I come out he’s in the waiting room holding a printout of the ultrasound like it’s a stock certificate for the only company that ever mattered.
The nurse gave him his own copy. I watch him look at it, watch his thumb move over the grainy little profile, and I have to turn toward the reception desk and pretend to study a flu-shot poster until my eyes behave.
In the parking lot, Griffin walks me to my car. The afternoon sun is bright after the darkness of the exam room, and I have to squint to see him properly.
“Can I ask you a question?” he says, in the careful voice he uses now, the one that leaves room for no.
“Depends on what it is.”
“When did you know? That you were pregnant, I mean. Before the launch, or after?”
I consider lying. Consider telling him it’s none of his business, that we’re not together anymore and he doesn’t have the right to ask personal questions.
But he was just in that room with me. He just watched our daughter’s heartbeat. He’s trying, really trying, and maybe he deserves a little honesty.
“The night of the pre-launch party,” I say. “I suspected. I didn’t confirm it until the next morning.”
“So when you heard me talking to Blake…”
“I already knew. Or thought I knew.”
He’s quiet for a moment, processing this. “That must have made it so much worse.”
“Yeah.” I unlock my car, and I don’t tell him the rest of it, that knowing about her while listening to him disown me was like being handed a sunrise and a burial in the same breath. Some truths are still mine. “It did.”
“Hannah, I…”
“Don’t.” I hold up my hand. “Don’t apologize again. Don’t tell me you’ve changed or you’re sorry or any of it. Just… not today. Okay?”
He nods slowly. “Okay.”
“I’ll send you the next appointment date.”
“Thank you.”
I get in my car and start the engine, and I sit there one second longer than I need to with my hands on the wheel, because the last time a man said those words to me in a parking lot of any kind, I believed them for free.
Belief costs more now. He knows that. It’s why he didn’t wait for an answer.
Griffin steps back, but he doesn’t leave.
He just stands there in the parking lot, watching me.
“I love you,” he says through the open window. “I know I lost the right to say it. But I love you, Hannah.”
I don’t respond. I put the car in reverse and back out of the space.
But as I drive away, I watch him in the rearview mirror, standing there in the parking lot, alone, still watching.
And something in my chest aches in a way it hasn’t in months.