Epilogue – Sofia #2
The sonographer was warm and efficient. “We’ll just take this step by step, all right?
” she said, already reaching for the gel.
She moved through the preliminary questions quickly, confirmed my dates with a soft, “That lines up,” and then I was on the table, Gregory standing at its edge, the machine doing its particular work.
“Cold,” she warned. Then, quieter, “You’re doing fine.”
The sound came first—the rapid, certain rush of a heartbeat. My breath caught before I could stop it. “That’s—” I started, but the words didn’t quite land, because then, before my brain fully processed what I was hearing, a second one came underneath it. Distinct. Separate. Its own rhythm.
I went still. “Wait,” I said, sharper this time. “There’s—”
Gregory’s hand tightened slightly where it hovered near mine. “Is that normal?” he asked, his voice controlled but thinner than usual, like something had slipped under the surface.
The sonographer smiled. I watched it happen in my peripheral vision, the particular smile of someone about to deliver information that would change the shape of someone’s day. “Let me show you,” she said gently.
I stared at the ceiling for a half-second and felt the room recalibrate. The air felt different. My chest felt too tight, too full, like something was expanding faster than I could adjust to it.
“Okay,” she said, turning the monitor toward us. “So this—” she pointed lightly, “—is one. And this is the second.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows, heart racing. “There are two,” I said, like saying it out loud might make it more real, or less.
Gregory let out a quiet breath beside me, something almost like a disbelieving laugh. “Two,” he repeated, softer.
“Congratulations,” the sonographer said, and her voice carried the warmth of someone who genuinely meant it. She angled the screen toward us properly now, giving us the full view. “You’re having twins. A boy and a girl.”
“A boy and a—” I stopped, the words catching somewhere between disbelief and something dangerously close to awe. I looked at Gregory, searching his face like I needed confirmation from him as much as from the machine. “Did she just say—?”
“She did,” he said, still looking at the screen, like he was committing it to memory. His hand found mine properly this time, fingers closing around it with quiet certainty. “A boy and a girl.”
I let out a breath that turned into something halfway between a laugh and a sob. “That feels excessive,” I said, because it was either that or start crying properly.
The sonographer laughed softly. “It can feel that way at first,” she said. “But they look good. Both of them.”
“Both of them,” I repeated, and this time it landed differently. Not shock. Not quite. Something steadier. Something that settled into place even as everything else shifted around it.
Gregory’s thumb moved once over my knuckles, slow and grounding. “We’re having twins,” he said, quieter now, like he was saying it for himself.
And I nodded, eyes still on the screen, on the two small, impossible proofs of something that had already changed everything. “We are,” I said.
I watched his shoulders move with a breath that was very slow and very controlled; his jaw, above his hands, was tight.
His knuckles were white. The man who had stood in the basement of Maverick’s building with his gun raised and his face utterly still, who had fought Nico Calderon in our living room with the cold efficiency of someone for whom violence was a native language, was covering his face with both hands in a clinical room in Chicago because a sonographer had told him he was having twins, and he was not entirely in control of himself, and he wasn’t hiding it.
He eventually lowered his hands. His eyes, when he looked at me, were bright, something I’d never seen before, and I registered it as the specific thing it was—a man who didn’t cry and wasn’t going to, but whose eyes were doing the nearest available equivalent.
He looked at me like I was the only fixed point in whatever the room had become.
“Sofia,” he said. His voice was rough at the edges. “I’m going to be a dad. We’re going to be parents.”
I felt the tears before I decided to cry, an involuntary response to the look on his face, to the way he said it.
“Two,” I managed. “You’re going to be a dad of two. Simultaneously.”
A smile broke across his face, and he reached over, took my hand, and held it too tightly, and I let him.
The drive home had the quality of an aftermath.
The city was the same city, the skyline holding its familiar arrangement against a sky that had gone from grey to the warm gold of late afternoon, the sun finally delivering on what the morning had withheld.
Gregory drove, and I sat with my hands folded in my lap and looked at the city and felt, beneath the enormity of the afternoon, something that had been an absence for so long I’d stopped noticing it as absence.
Something quiet and even and solid, beneath all the complicated layers, beneath the unresolved things and the history that would take years to fully metabolize.
I watched his profile for a moment, taking in the strong jaw, the stubble, the faint scar, and the set of his mouth that I’d spent so many months reading, misreading, and learning.
He looked like he was holding something in.
Not in the rigid, sealed-off way I’d come to associate with his control, but in the careful way of a man carrying something breakable in his bare hands.
His fingers shifted slightly on the wheel. A small adjustment, the micro-tension of a man preparing for something. Then he exhaled once, low and measured.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said.
I went still.
The skyline moved past the window, warm and gold, the city doing its indifferent, beautiful work around us. For a second, neither of us said anything. I could feel my pulse in my throat, in my wrists, in the quiet space between us that suddenly didn’t feel quiet at all.
He kept his eyes on the road when he said it. “I love you.” His voice was low, controlled in the way it always was when the thing underneath it mattered too much. “I think I’ve loved you longer than I was willing to admit. Longer than I let myself say it. Maybe longer than I even understood it.”
Something inside my chest pulled tight.
He let out a breath that sounded almost like frustration, but softer than that, rougher.
“I told myself a lot of things in the beginning. Things that were easier to live with. Easier to control. I told myself you were a responsibility, a complication, a job I needed to finish.” His jaw tightened.
“You weren’t. You were never just that.”
I looked at him fully then, and he glanced at me, quick and unguarded, those blue eyes stripped of their usual distance.
“You were the point where it stopped being a job,” he said. “You were the reason I stopped being able to do what I was supposed to do without thinking about what it would do to you. And after that, you became the reason I couldn’t think clearly about anything else.”
The tears came fast enough that I didn’t have time to stop them. I looked down for a second, breathing through the sharp ache of it, through the terrible tenderness of hearing the thing I’d wanted and feared in equal measure.
He reached across the console then. His hand found mine and held it. Not desperately. Not like the grip from the clinic. Something steadier than that. The hold of a man who had made a decision and was willing to stay inside it.
“I know I’m not the man who should ask this of you,” he said.
“I know what I did. I know what it cost you. I know what I was when I met you.” His thumb moved slowly across my knuckles.
“And I’m going to spend a long time making that right, if you let me.
But I’m done pretending this is anything other than what it is. ”
My throat burned.
He looked at me again, direct this time, with none of the practiced coldness left in him.
“I love you,” he said once more, like he wanted there to be no room for doubt, no way for me to mistake it for anything less.
“Not because of the babies. Not because of what we’ve survived.
Because it’s true. Because it has been true for longer than I wanted it to be, and I’m done not saying it. ”
The city blurred gold beyond the glass. I squeezed his hand without thinking, held on like my body had decided before my mind could catch up.
“I love you too,” I said, and my voice broke on the words, cracked clean through the middle. I let it. “I think I’ve loved you longer than I wanted to admit, too.”
Something changed in his face then. Not dramatic. Gregory was never dramatic. But I saw it, the shift, the small fracture in all that control as the words landed where he had clearly needed them to land.
I laughed once through the tears, breathless and uneven. “You really chose to say that while driving?”
The corner of his mouth twitched, faint and real. “I was trying to avoid giving myself an out.”
That made me cry harder, which felt deeply unfair.
I turned my hand in his and laced our fingers together properly. “Don’t do that again,” I said, meaning the not-calling, and the going alone, and the silence, and all the distances he put between himself and being reached. “If we’re doing this—and we are doing this—don’t do that again.”
“I won’t,” he said. And then, quieter: “I’ll try.”
Outside, Chicago held itself in the last of the afternoon light, warm and unapologetic, the city going on as cities do, regardless of the private enormity of the lives moving through it.
Inside the car, two people who had found each other amid the wreckage sat in the quiet of something that was neither simple nor finished, and not, in any clean way, resolved.
But it was ours. And we were going home.
***
THE END