Chapter 20 - Willow
WILLOW
I’ve been in this ultrasound room enough now that my body knows what to do without thinking.
I remove my shoes, kicking them at the laminated tile, bare my belly, and pull the falling paper gown further up my shoulders.
I turn my head toward the screen and don’t look at the needles tray, even if they’re not for me.
“Warm gel,” Priya warns, already smiling because she knows I flinch anyway. She’s the sonographer with the bracelets that always click softly, the one who narrates without making it a lecture. “Dr. Patel’s on her way, but we’ll get started.”
I nod. My heart’s doing that hummingbird thing again, even though last night’s scare turned out fine. “Okay.”
Behind me, three shadows fall across the floor and stack into a single shape. The men—not mine yet, even after that heated conversation—line up at my shoulder like they rehearsed it.
Declan stands at my right, close enough that the heat off him warms my bare upper arm.
Sean is just behind my head, his hands on both of my shoulders.
Rowan is at my left, his posture careful and his gaze fixed dead center on the monitor.
He shifts legs and sucks his teeth and carefully avoids making eye contact with anyone but the dark screen.
For the first time in a long time, nobody’s sharpening anything on anyone or covering panic with jokes. The room is frozen on a quiet inhale.
The gel lands and I yip anyway. “Habit,” I tell Priya, who winks and rolls the probe lower, angles. The grainy universe on the screen stutters, then resolves.
There they are.
Three bright crescents of skull, like moons at different quarters. A curved spine, beads on a string. A flicker-flicker that always makes my throat close—hearts, throwing their light like they’ve got nothing to hide.
Sean exhales a laugh he doesn’t mean to let out. “Jaysus, would you look at them.”
Declan says nothing, but he squeezes my shoulder, sharing space with Sean’s hand, and I lift my hands to grip both of their fingers.
When I glance up at him, tears are shining in his eyes under the fluorescent lighting of the hospital.
He gasps when one moves and looks down at me with a tenderness I find alarming.
For a brief second, I think about my father and whether or not he had this reaction when he saw my ultrasound or my sister’s.
Did he always know he’d run? Did he know in his gut that it wasn’t going to be my mom forever?
Were we just collateral damage or was there something about us that made him want to try over again?
He started another family with his mistress… was it guilt or were we damaged?
“Hey, where’d you drift to?” Rowan whispers, pulling me out of my head, and I blink up at him, not expecting that warmth from him.
His voice is rougher than it should be, brushing low in my ear.
My skin prickles where his breath lands.
I shake my head, and he presses his palm to my head, like he might stroke my hair, and then he pulls back as Priya starts to talk.
Priya narrates. “Triplet A first. Head down, spine along your right. Heart rate is…” She trails off, and whatever she’s doing doesn’t matter to me because all I can focus on is how the baby’s hand floats up and bumps its own cheek.
A real person is inside me, touching their real cheek with their real hand.
“…one forty-two. Beautiful. Fluid’s good.
“Triplet B,” she continues, sliding the probe up and left. “Our wiggle worm. Breech at the moment—don’t panic, plenty of time to flip. Heart rate one forty. Practice breathing…see the chest? In-out, in-out. Overachiever.
“Triplet C,” she goes on, voice softer, because she somehow reads the way my breath shortens when we get to the last one. The probe dips; the machine hums. “Posterior. Shy. There we go. Heart rate one thirty-eight. All three reactive.”
Declan’s hand finds the rail of the exam table.
He doesn’t say anything, but the way his shoulders lower, as if he’s been carrying a backpack full of bricks, does it for him.
“Reactive,” he whispers to himself. “Reactive is good.” He’s close enough that the word ghosts against my temple.
I could count every lash if I turned my head.
The smallest face I’ve ever seen swims into view. I gasp. “Lord, look at that face.” The mouth opens, and I look over at her sharply. “Is he…she…are they crying?”
Priya shakes her head and smiles, a twinkle in her eye. “Yawning.”
“Oh! Oh.” Yawning. A real person who’s tired. Yawning, just like any one of us. My eyes sting, thinking about my child yawning in school or at a job or before bed. A real person with a real future. A tear falls down my cheek.
Rowan clears his throat. “Fetal growth percentiles?”
“Patel will give you the full report,” Priya replies, not looking away from the images. “But quick look is reassuring. Discordance is acceptable.”
“Discordance is acceptable,” I repeat, and Sean chuckles.
He leans over my shoulder and mutters, “It means they’re all growing at about the same rate—no one’s slacking off in there.”
Priya keeps rolling. The screen goes sci-fi—colors, pulses, river maps. “Umbilical artery looks good for all three. No absent end-diastolic flow. We like that.”
“We do, sure,” Declan says, and I catch the corner of his mouth shift, not quite a smile, more like a door propped open with a foot. “Grand readings all around,” he mutters to himself.
Rowan’s voice comes soft from just beside me, not meant for the room so much as for me. “They’re okay, Willow. Are you?”
“I am,” I whisper, and the oddest thing happens. The tension doesn’t flood back. It doesn’t sharpen. It just…eases, like someone put a palm flat between my shoulder blades.
The door clicks open and Dr. Patel glides in, coffee in hand, eyes bright in the low light.
“Sorry, sorry, I spilled a coffee all over my keyboard this morning, and—” She cuts herself off and leans in, scanning the screen, then nods.
“These look lovely. Everyone’s behaving for once,” she says.
“Let’s keep it that way. Priya, biophysical profiles? ”
Priya toggles. “Breathing: present. Movement: present. Tone: present. Fluid: adequate.” She clicks the keyboard like a pianist finishing a run. “Eight out of eight for each. Triple A’s top of the class.”
Sean leans down enough that I feel the whisper of his breath on my hair. “Show-off, so you are.”
“Stop talking about yourself,” I say, and we share a small grin we don’t need to push any farther.
Patel rounds to my side. “How are you, Ms. Abel? Any headaches, visual changes, epigastric pain?”
“No,” I say. “Just…it scared me—the ‘reduced fetal movement.’” I say it sarcastically to mask how scared I really was. Terrified. Angry. Lost.
Declan makes a small sound I don’t recognize until I realize it’s him agreeing without words. I can’t even imagine how scary it was for him now that I know what he went through with Aiden. And still he was a rock for me. The memory threads through my chest like a stitch I need.
Patel nods. “You did the right thing coming in. You’ll do it again if you need. No extra points for stoicism.” Her eyes flick up and over my shoulder to the line of men, amused. “The peanut gallery behaving?”
“For once,” I murmur.
Priya prints photos, and the machine coughs out tiny squares that will live on my fridge until the next set replaces them. Little profile. Little foot. Little hand. A smudge that Priya promises is a yawn. I cradle the film like it could bruise.
“Two more things,” Patel says, business returning as smoothly as it left. “First, logistics—I want to see you twice weekly from here out. We want to keep a close watch as we near the end of this pregnancy.”
“You want to stalk me, noted. And second?”
Patel glances around at the men. “Let’s get the peanut gallery out of here first.”
I shake my head. “They’ve been here for me through this whole experience. I want them here. They’re my translators.”
“You won’t need a translator for this part, Willow, and you can always fill them in—”
I shake my head and say firmly, “They stay.”
She sighs and looks down at the floor. “Okay. Miss Abel, would you be interested in having a paternity test done?”
The air doesn’t so much change as it notices itself. I can feel three men straighten without moving. My palms go damp under the paper drape.
“I—”
“You don’t have to say yes,” she says gently. “You don’t even have to say anything right now. Think about it. But it…” She leans in and murmurs, “There are legal protections, many reasons why you might want to know who is…responsible.”
“I don’t think…”
“You should do it,” Rowan says. “She’s right. There are plenty of reasons to be legally recognized as family.”
“No rush,” Patel says gently, and this is why I trust her. She never pushes me to the cliff. She gestures toward the screen. “For today, I want you to take home the fact that everyone on that monitor is dancing. Eat. Hydrate. Feet up. You make sure to find someone to wait on you like a princess.”
“You hear that, boys? Doctor’s orders—I’m royalty now,” I say smugly, fluffing my hair.
“She doesn’t need encouragement, God love her,” Sean says cheerfully, and Patel’s mouth curves.
“Questions?” she asks the room at large.
We all shake our heads, but I know we all have questions. I just don’t know whether or not we can handle the answers.