23. Elena #2
His influence remains in the apartment even after his body leaves it.
In the flowers still on the table. In the extra pillow by the sofa.
In the fact that the grocery order includes the exact brand of crackers he insisted were easiest on my stomach and the tea I only started drinking because he kept placing it in my hand until refusal became ineffectual.
None of this is reassuring. Just proof that he can leave the room without loosening control.
By evening, I am tired enough to be irritable and irritable enough to resent the way I keep looking toward the sofa as if he might still be there.
He is not. The apartment remains offensively ordinary about that fact.
I sleep badly that night.
* * *
The next morning, the clinic feels too bright.
That is an unfair observation; it always feels bright.
Clean and orderly and aggressively efficient in a way that makes even a healthy person feel a little managed on sight.
It must feel worse because I have been gone from it long enough that the rhythms of the apartment replaced the rhythms of the exam rooms. And because some part of me—stupid, irrational, humiliating—still expects to find him when I step inside.
Naturally, I don’t. Walsh is the one waiting when the nurse directs me in, chart already in hand, expression professionally neutral in the way that means she has observed far more than she intends to acknowledge.
“Good morning, Elena.”
“Is it?”
“That depends,” she says dryly. “Sit.”
I sit. She takes my blood pressure, asks the standard questions, makes notes in the chart with the same efficient precision she always has.
There is nothing wrong with her care. She is competent, steady, impossible to read when she chooses to be.
Under any other circumstances, I would probably find her manner reassuring.
Today, it feels like disappointment wearing a lab coat.
“Symptoms?” she asks.
“Tired.”
“Normal?”
“Irritable.”
“One would assume.”
I glance at her. “Are you always this comforting?”
“Only when accuracy seems more useful.”
There it is. The same cadence. The same clipped precision. Less severe than him, but shaped by the same environment long enough to have acquired its edges.
She writes something down. “Bleeding?”
“None.”
“Pain?”
“No.”
“Dizziness?”
“Only existentially.”
That gets the faintest movement at the corner of her mouth.
When she finishes taking notes, she sets down the cuff and studies me over the chart in a way I dislike immediately because it suggests she knows exactly what I am trying not to make obvious.
“Dr. Brennan thought you’d prefer space after the intensive monitoring,” she says. The sentence lands so cleanly, it sounds premeditated.
I stare at her. “Did he?”
“Yes.”
“And was that a medical judgment?”
“It was a judgment.”
Which is not an answer and absolutely is.
I look away first, because if I don’t, I might say something too revealing. The paper liner on the exam table crackles beneath my hands as I shift.
“I don’t need space,” I say, which is true and also not something I should have admitted out loud.
Walsh makes no visible reaction, though I would bet money she is storing the sentence away for later assessment. “Need is not generally the standard by which he operates.”
“No,” I say. “I’ve noticed.”
The appointment proceeds. Routine vitals. A brief scan. Questions about activity tolerance. All of it normal enough that by the end of it, I should feel reassured.
But all I feel is hollowed out by the fact that he never appears. Not in the corridor. Not at the desk. Not as an interruption framed as coincidence.
Nothing.
By the time I leave, irritation has curdled into something less manageable. A sense of aching absence.
Which is such an embarrassing phrase that I reject it immediately.
And then, because the truth can be rude that way, I acknowledge it as the truth.
* * *
Back at the apartment, the afternoon stretches.
I answer two program messages. I eat because the schedule says to.
I read without absorbing a word. I stand at the window longer than necessary, watching Ballsbridge move through another gray day that has nothing to do with me.
Cars. Umbrellas. People going somewhere with purpose.
My hand rests on the curve of my stomach more often now without conscious thought, a habit I once found sentimental and now see as practical reassurance.
Week twenty-three. The number feels substantial. Real. A body becoming impossible to mistake as temporary.
I go to the kitchen to make tea, and that’s when I feel it.
At first, I think it’s nothing. Not pain, exactly. More like a strange, internal flutter low and to the side, so brief I could dismiss it as muscle twitch or digestion or another glamorous consequence of pregnancy no one bothers to mention until you are already living inside it.
I still for a moment, hand braced against the counter.
There. Again. Stronger this time. Not discomfort. A distinct, unmistakable movement from inside me that is not me.
My breath catches. “Oh.”
I lower myself carefully into the chair at the table, one hand spreading over my stomach as if that could somehow clarify it. The apartment is utterly silent around me.
Then it happens again. A kick. Not theoretical.
Not a blur on a monitor or a heartbeat under a doppler or one of the abstract reassurances everyone keeps translating into clinical language.
This is different. Physical. Immediate. A sharp, impossible little insistence from inside me that says I am here in the oldest language there is.
Tears sting unexpectedly behind my eyes. I blink them away at once.
“Okay,” I whisper, and then chuckle because that is apparently what I say now when reality outpaces my ability to process it. “Okay.”
It happens once more. Smaller. Like an answer.
And with that, before I can stop it, there is only one person I want to tell.
Cormac.
Not Walsh. Not Niamh. Not Grace, though she would probably understand the significance well enough. Definitely not Aoife, who would hear everything else underneath it and ask questions I am not equipped to answer.
Cormac.
Because he would understand exactly what week twenty-three means in relation to placental stabilization and bed rest and risk progression.
Because he would know why this matters beyond sentiment.
Because for the last three weeks, every important change has happened in the same room as him, with his hands on the monitor and his eyes on me, and my body has apparently decided that knowledge now belongs to both of us whether I approve of that or not.
My phone is on the table beside the flowers. I look at it. I do not pick it up.
Because what exactly would I say? The baby kicked. As if that is a normal thing to text the father of your ex-boyfriend, who also runs the program controlling your housing and medical care, and who deliberately withdrew from you because he assumed, wrongly, that you wanted space.
The thought alone is enough to make my pulse quicken.
I hate that he is the one I want. Not in the broad, catastrophic sense. I am trying very hard not to examine that too directly. I mean in this moment. In this specific, immediate, humiliating way.
I want to share it with him. That’s the truth.
And because it is the truth, I do not move.
The kick comes again, a softer, rolling nudge this time. I press my hand more firmly to my stomach and sit there in the late afternoon light, saying nothing, calling no one.
Eventually, the movement settles, and the silence returns. I make the tea. Drink half of it while standing at the counter before remembering the activity restrictions and sitting down like he would tell me to if he were here.
The thought makes something twist unpleasantly in my chest.