Chapter 7 #3
“I’ll review the scope,” I said, moderating my tone. “I want to see the milestones before I commit resources.”
Diane nodded. “That’s what I expected you to say. I’ll send the detailed brief this afternoon. Monday morning, I want a recommendation, not a martyrdom pledge.”
It shouldn’t have mattered that she gave me a few days. It did.
The meeting broke up. Sasha gathered her folders and paused beside my chair.
“You all right?” she asked.
The question was clean, devoid of hidden subtext.
“Yeah. Just a long morning.”
Sasha’s eyes flicked to the top of my tote, where a corner of the white envelope poked out past the zipper. She didn’t ask what it was.
“Don’t turn your afternoon into an endurance test,” she said. “I’ll send over my risk analysis. We can walk through it tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She left before I could convert her decency into a debt.
Priya appeared in my doorway twenty minutes later holding a cup of yogurt and a plastic spoon. She knew my habits well enough not to show up with a speech.
“I’m not here to stage an intervention,” she announced from the threshold. “I come bearing food with zero personality.”
“That’s a heavy promise for dairy.”
“I tried it. It doesn’t deserve one, but it works.”
I set my pen down. I’d lined up the New York folder with the edge of my keyboard and my pen parallel to the folder. Priya noticed, of course. She didn’t say a word.
“How did it go?” she asked.
I reached into my bag. The envelope made a crisp rustle as I pulled it out. Priya gently pushed the office door shut.
“There’s cardiac activity,” I said.
Her eyes pooled with tears, though the shape of her mouth didn’t change. “Is everything okay?”
“The doctor said the measurements match six weeks. That it’s early. That we go back in a few weeks.”
Priya nodded slowly, as if filing each statement into a separate drawer so they wouldn’t tangle.
“And the estimated due date is December second.”
“December,” she repeated softly.
“Yeah.”
I sat down because my legs had officially resigned. Priya pulled up the guest chair, not touching the envelope yet.
“Can I see?”
The question made my fingers tighten against the paper. I thought of the gray screen, of Cole sitting in the quiet without trying to fill it, of the blue New York boxes crowding my calendar.
“Yeah.”
Priya leaned in. She studied the scan as if it were a piece of delicate forensic evidence rather than an answer that was going to reorganize the next nine months of my life.
“Looks like a little seed,” she whispered.
“Looks like an expensive ink smudge.”
“Both can be true.”
I didn’t laugh. This time, the physical wave hit first: heat in my cheeks, the wet pressure behind my eyelids, a stubborn, tight knot in my throat. I spun my chair toward the window before Priya had to watch my armor come apart.
Downtown Seattle stretched below in neat grids of glass and wet asphalt. A bike messenger leaned into the uphill grade, a square insulated pack strapped to his back. In the next office over, someone argued the palette of a marketing campaign.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel,” I said.
Priya didn’t jump up to wrap me in an embrace. She set the yogurt cup on my desk and gave me room to breathe.
“You don’t have to figure that out today.”
The sentence was nearly identical to what she’d told me in the parking lot, but it didn’t belong to the same week anymore.
I looked at the image again. At the bottom, beside a calibration scale, the clinic’s date stamp sat on the paper with an administrative certainty that rubbed me raw.
“Until yesterday, everything had an ‘if’ in front of it,” I said. “If it took. If we decided to go through with it. Now everyone is talking about the next appointment, December, travel schedules. As if ‘if’ became ‘when’ without asking me.”
Priya rested her elbows on her knees. “What word?”
I wanted to say baby. I wanted to say future. Neither word made it past my lips.
“When.”
My phone buzzed against the blotter. Cole’s name lit up the screen.
Cole: Done with practice. No need to reply. Just wanted to check how things went when you got back.
Priya read the question on my face, not the screen. “Is that him?”
“Yeah.”
“Is he still decent?”
I stared at the text. I thought of the hand that hadn’t wavered during Marisol’s long silence. His admission that he had no grand plan, just bad tea and time. The blue calendar boxes claiming my summer without consulting me.
“So far,” I said.
Priya gave a firm nod. She opened the yogurt and handed me the plastic spoon. “Provisional rating stands, then.”
I took the spoon. The first bite tasted of artificial vanilla and nothing else.
Before I could overthink it, I typed a reply to Cole.
Me: Went well. Working. I’ll call you tonight.
I slipped the ultrasound print back into the envelope and slid the envelope into the center drawer of my desk. I wasn’t ready to take it home, or leave it out in the open, or decide what place it occupied in any roadmap.
But when I pushed the drawer shut, my fingers stayed on the metal handle for a second longer.