26. BAILEY
Chapter twenty-six
BAILEY
Finn is already in the parking lot when I pull in.
My appointment is at nine-thirty. I told him nine-fifteen was fine. It is currently nine-oh-three, and he is leaning against his truck with one ankle crossed over the other, wearing the expression of a man trying very hard to look casual while failing in several obvious ways.
He sees my car and straightens.
I park, turn off the engine, and sit there for one second longer than necessary. Not because I don’t want him here. I do.
I want his big nervous body in the waiting room, his hand near mine, his steady presence beside me when the doctor says things I already know but suddenly feel different because they’re about me. About us.
Wanting him here is not the problem.
The problem is that everything feels tender right now, and Finn has a habit of trying to protect tender things by organizing them.
Finn opens my door before I can reach for the handle.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
He scans my face. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I should’ve parked farther away so you’d have less time to assess me before we reached the door.”
His mouth curves, but his eyes stay serious.
“What’s in your hand?”
He looks down at the paper bag and water bottle as if they appeared there without his involvement. “Snacks.”
“Finn.”
“Just crackers. Ginger chews. A granola bar.” He pauses. “Not the weird kind. Normal. No seeds that look like aquarium gravel.”
Despite everything, I laugh and see his shoulders loosen at the sound.
“I’m not helpless, and I did eat breakfast,” I tell him.
“I know.”
“I’m also a nurse.”
“A very hot nurse.”
“Do not flirt with me in a medical parking lot while holding emergency crackers.”
His smile turns real for half a second before his nerves creep back in around the edges. I take the water bottle from him, giving his hands one less thing to grip.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome.”
***
The waiting room is warm, too bright, and filled with women in various stages of pregnancy, plus partners trying to look calm.
A toddler in dinosaur boots tries to climb under a chair while his mother signs paperwork.
A man near the window reads a pamphlet with the intensity of someone studying for an exam.
Finn checks us in because I let him, then immediately looks like he regrets taking charge.
“Did I overstep?” he asks quietly when we sit.
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He nods, then pulls a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket.
I look at it, then at him.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says.
“That depends on what it is.”
“A few questions.” He glances down at the paper. “Maybe more than a few. Some are probably unnecessary, and I already crossed off the one about rotating car seats because even I heard myself.”
I should be irritated. Part of me is. But then his thumb moves over one creased corner, smoothing it again and again, and the irritation never gets much traction.
He isn’t trying to take over. He’s trying to stand in a room where he can’t hit anything, fix anything, or charm the fear into something easier to carry.
“You came prepared,” I say.
“I came nervous.”
That gets through me faster than the list does.
I look at him, at the paper in his hand, at the snacks by his feet, at the water bottle he already gave me. Ridiculous. Sweet. Terrified. Here.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I say.
His face changes, just enough to show me how badly he needed to hear it.
“Me too,” he says, quieter now, and the paper lowers in his hand.
For one moment, he is exactly who I need. Not the questions. Not the jokes. Not the walking emergency snack station. Just Finn, sitting beside me in a doctor’s office, scared and here anyway.
Then the nurse opens the door and calls my name, and his entire body goes on alert.
I stand. “Breathe.”
“I am.”
“You stopped.”
“I restarted.”
The nurse smiles as we follow her back. “First appointment?”
“Yes,” I say.
Finn says, “Clearly,” at the same time.
The nurse laughs, and Finn looks relieved that someone finds him charming in a medical setting.
I give him a look.
He mouths, Sorry.
The intake is normal. Blood pressure. Weight. Questions. Dates. Symptoms. The kind of things I know from the professional side, except now every answer feels personal in a way I don’t like. Finn sits in the chair beside me, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, trying to stay quiet.
When the doctor comes in, she is calm, kind, and efficient. She goes over what to expect, asks about nausea, sleep, vitamins, and medical history. Finn listens like every word is being carved into stone.
Then she says we’ll do an early ultrasound, and my heart flips before I can prepare for it.
I knew it was possible. I knew there was a chance we would see something today, maybe even hear something, but knowing from the professional side and lying here with Finn beside me are two completely different things.
His hand finds mine before I have to ask, warm and steady around my fingers while the room shifts into motion around us.
The lights dim. The monitor angles toward the bed. The doctor explains each step gently, and I focus on breathing, on the crinkle of paper beneath me, on Finn’s thumb moving once over my knuckles.
And then there it is on the screen. A tiny shape, grainy and almost impossible to make sense of at first, barely more than a flicker of possibility. But there. Real.
The doctor points out what we’re seeing, her voice calm as she names the gestational sac, the yolk sac, the fetal pole, and tells us everything is measuring right on track. The words reach me through a strange, distant rush, like my body understands them before the rest of me catches up.
Then she finds the heartbeat. Fast and tiny, filling the room with a sound that isn’t loud exactly, but feels bigger than anything I’ve ever heard.
Finn’s hand tightens on mine as I look at him.
His eyes stay fixed on the screen, his face open in a way I almost never get to see.
No easy grin. No clever line waiting. No charming escape route.
Just Finn, stunned and completely undone while that fast, tiny rhythm fills the room and pulls both of us into the same quiet, impossible moment.
My throat burns because this is what I needed. Not a solution. Not a plan. Not him trying to organize the fear into something useful. I needed him here with me, seeing it, feeling it, letting the moment be big without trying to make it smaller.
The doctor says softly, “Strong heartbeat.”
Finn blinks fast, and I feel his thumb tremble once against my hand. His jaw works like he’s trying to hold something back, and for one second, I think he’s going to let me see it.
Then his smile appears too quickly, too bright for the room.
“Strong is good,” he says, his voice rough around the edges. “Obviously. Takes after Bailey.”
The nurse smiles. “That’s a good start.”
Finn keeps going because nerves are faster than restraint. Finn keeps going because nerves are faster than restraint. “I already looked up baby skates. For research. Obviously.”
The nurse laughs lightly. The doctor smiles.
I don’t.
Not because it’s a terrible joke. It isn’t.
It’s very Finn. It’s almost sweet, and in another room, on another day, it might have pulled a laugh out of me.
But I just watched his real reaction vanish behind it, and now his thumb is still trembling against mine while his mouth tries to convince everyone he’s fine.
He is not fine.
Everyone else might miss that, but I don’t.
The rest of the appointment moves around us in a blur.
The doctor answers questions, including a few of Finn’s, though I have to put my hand over the paper in his lap before he can ask three in a row about safe foods, nausea management, and whether travel schedules affect stress levels in a “hypothetical but also not hypothetical” way.
He stops when I touch him, but I can feel the questions still running through his brain, one after another, looking for somewhere to go.
When we leave, he carries the ultrasound photo like it’s fragile. Outside, cold air wraps around us, sharp enough to make me zip my coat while he stands beside me staring down at the small, grainy image.
“That was...” He stops, then lets out a breath and shakes his head. “Wild.”
“Yeah,” I say.
His smile comes back, smaller this time. “Tiny, but very dramatic. Showing up on a screen and changing everyone’s life before lunch is a strong entrance.”
The joke is softer now, but the ache in me doesn’t ease. He still hasn’t said what I saw on his face. He still hasn’t let himself stay in that quiet place where the heartbeat found both of us and made the room feel too full to breathe.
I look at the photo in his hand, then back at him. There are things I want to say, but not in a parking lot. Not when he looks like one wrong touch might make him drop the only proof we have that everything changed.
“Do you want to come over?” I ask.
His relief is immediate. “Yes.”
At my house, he makes me tea before I can take off my shoes. Peppermint, because he remembers. He sets crackers on the coffee table, water beside them, then sits next to me and pulls out his phone. At first, I think he’s texting Coach or Dylan, but then I catch a glimpse of the screen.
Baby gear.
A whole page of it.
I stare at the phone, then at him. “Are you already looking at strollers?”
He glances down as if he forgot the evidence is in his hand. “Not strollers.”
I wait.
“Cribs,” he admits. “But I’m not buying one. I’m just looking. There are safety ratings and mattress firmness things, and apparently some convert into toddler beds, which sounds practical.”
The tea warms my hands, and the ultrasound photo sits on the coffee table between us, small and grainy and impossible to ignore. I know he’s trying. I know this is love or fear or both moving through him with nowhere else to go. But something inside me tightens anyway.
“I don’t need a crib today,” I say.
“I know.”
“And I don’t need you to solve everything before we’ve even had time to sit with what happened in that room.”
His phone lowers. Not all the way, but enough for the air between us to change.
“I’m not trying to solve everything,” he says.
“You are, though.” I keep my voice softer than my first instinct wants it to be. “You’re making lists. You’re researching gear. You’re trying to turn every feeling into something useful.”
He looks down at the phone again, then locks the screen and sets it on the coffee table. “I’m trying to help.”
“I know you are.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” His voice is quiet, but there’s an edge under it. Not anger exactly. Hurt. Like he thought he was doing the one thing he knew how to do, and now I’m telling him it’s wrong.
I set my mug down carefully. “Be here with me.”
His eyes lift to mine. “I am here.”
“I know you’re physically here. That’s not what I mean.
” I take a breath, because this is the part that matters, and I don’t want to turn it into an accusation.
“I saw you in that room, Finn. I saw what that heartbeat did to you. For a second, you were right there with me. Then you made a joke, and everyone laughed, and suddenly you were gone again.”
His face stills.
“I made one joke,” he says.
“It wasn’t about the joke.”
“It feels like it was.”
“It was about what came after it.” I lean forward, trying to make him hear me before the wall goes all the way up.
“I’m not asking you to stop being funny.
I like that part of you. I need that part of you sometimes.
But I don’t want the joke to be where you disappear every time something matters or frightens you. ”
He looks away, jaw tight, and I hate how fast this is slipping sideways.
“I did feel it,” he says.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. That’s why it hurt when you covered it up.”
For a second, I think he understands. I can see it move across his face, the recognition, the flash of fear underneath. Then he pulls back from it, not physically, but enough that I feel the distance open.
“So what do you want me to do?” he asks. “No jokes. Fewer questions. No research. No gear. I’m trying to figure out the rules here, Bailey.”
My throat tightens. “There aren’t rules.”
“There seems to be a lot of things I’m getting wrong.”
“That isn’t what I’m saying.”
“It’s what I’m hearing.”
The words sit between us, and neither of us seems to know how to move around them. Outside, January rain taps against the windows. Inside, the ultrasound picture lies on my coffee table, proof of a future so tiny and enormous that I can barely look at it without wanting to cry.
I look at Finn, trying so hard to be good at this that he can’t hear me asking him to be real.
And for the first time since he told me he was all in, I understand how easy it would be for us to love each other and still miss each other in all the ways that matter.