Chapter Thirty-Eight The Sound of a Second Heartbeat
The eight-week appointment fell on a Tuesday, squeezed between Jennie’s own clinic hours with the specific scheduling gymnastics that came from being both a patient and a full-time physician at the same hospital.
“Dr. Chen will see you now,” the receptionist said, and Jennie felt Lin Xing’s hand tighten briefly around hers — the same hand that had, over the past three weeks, developed a habit of finding hers at entirely random moments throughout the day, like he needed regular, quiet confirmation that all of this was actually happening.
Dr. Chen — an OB-GYN two floors down from pediatrics, whom Jennie had nodded to in hallways for two years without ever exchanging more than pleasantries — turned out to have a bedside manner so gentle it nearly undid Jennie’s composure before the appointment had properly started.
“First pregnancy?” Dr. Chen asked, pulling up the ultrasound machine.
“First everything,” Jennie said. “First pregnancy, first appointment, first time either of us has sat in these chairs instead of standing on the other side of them.” “That tends to be the hardest part for physicians, in my experience. Sitting still and being the patient.” Dr. Chen smiled, warm and unhurried.
“Ready?” Jennie nodded, and reached for Lin Xing’s hand without looking, finding it already waiting.
The screen flickered to life, grey and grainy, and for a long moment Jennie couldn’t make sense of any of it — just shapes and shadows, nothing that looked like anything at all.
Then Dr. Chen adjusted the wand slightly, and a small, unmistakable flutter appeared on the screen, rhythmic and steady.
“There,” Dr. Chen said softly. “That’s your baby’s heartbeat. ” The room went very quiet.
Jennie had heard hundreds of heartbeats in her career — had pressed a stethoscope to more small chests than she could count, had taught frightened children that the sound meant brave and strong and safe.
She had never once heard one that undid her the way this one did, small and fast and entirely new, flickering steady on a screen in a room that suddenly felt too small to hold everything she was feeling.
“That’s—’ Her voice broke entirely. “That’s really it?
That’s really them?” “That’s really them,” Dr. Chen confirmed. “Heart rate’s right where it should be. Everything looks exactly the way it’s supposed to at eight weeks.”
Jennie turned to look at Lin Xing, and found him staring at the screen with an expression she’d never once seen on him — not even at the wedding, not even at the proposal.
Something had cracked open in his face completely, tears sliding down freely, unashamed, unhidden, his whole careful architecture simply gone.
“Hi,” he said, hoarse, to the screen, to the small flickering shape that would, in seven more months, become an actual person.
“I’ve been practicing what to say to you.
I find I’ve forgotten all of it.” “That’s alright,” Dr. Chen said gently, printing a strip of grainy images and handing them over with the practiced kindness of a woman who had witnessed this exact unraveling in exam rooms a thousand times before.
“Most people do, the first time. You have plenty of time to figure out the rest.”
They sat in the car afterward silently before either of them started the engine, the small printed ultrasound photo held between them, both of them simply looking at it.
“I want to frame this,” Jennie said finally.
“I know that’s ridiculous. It’s a grainy black-and-white blob.
I want to frame it anyway.” “It’s not ridiculous.
” Lin Xing’s voice was still rough. “I intend to frame it myself if you don’t get there first. I may frame several copies.
” “That does seem excessive.” “I contain multitudes,” he said, for what felt like the hundredth time in three weeks, and she laughed, wet and helpless, leaning her head against his shoulder while he finally, carefully, pulled out of the parking lot.
They told Sophia and Emma that evening, over dinner Jennie had insisted on cooking despite Lin Xing’s gentle suggestion that she let herself be looked after for one night.
Sophia took one look at the ultrasound photo, slid across the table with theatrical solemnity, and burst into tears so immediate and so loud that a couple at the next table turned to check nobody was hurt.
“I KNEW,” she wailed, mascara already ruined.
“I knew something was different. You’ve been drinking decaf for three weeks and I thought you’d simply lost your mind, and instead you were GROWING A PERSON—”
“You didn’t say anything?” “I was WAITING. I have RESTRAINT now, Jennie, I’ve grown as an individual.” Sophia wiped her eyes, already reaching for her phone.
“Okay. Godmother. I need to formally apply for godmother. I’ve already drafted several arguments in my favor.”
“We haven’t discussed godparents yet.” “I’ve discussed it. With myself. Extensively.
I have a presentation ready if needed.” Emma, considerably calmer, held the photo with the same careful reverence she brought to everything that mattered, and looked up at Jennie with an expression that carried the particular weight of someone who had spent two years quietly watching this entire story build toward exactly this moment.
“You’re going to be wonderful at this,” she said simply.
“lve thought so since the day I watched you convince a screaming four-year-old to accept a nebulizer mask using a teddy bear.
Some things just live in a person.” “I hope you're right.” “I’m always right about this kind of thing. It’s my one professional superpower.”
Emma, squeezed her hand. “How are you feeling? Really. Not the diplomatic answer.”
Jennie considered the question honestly. “Terrified. Happy. Terrified because I’m happy, if that makes sense.
Like the happiness is so big I keep waiting for something to come along and take a piece of it, just to make it a manageable size again.” “That’s normal,” Emma said gently. “Every mother I’ve ever nursed through a first pregnancy says some version of that. The fear doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.
It just means you already love them enough to be afraid for them.
” Lin Xing, listening quietly from across the table, reached over and covered Jennie’s hand with his own — the same gesture from a diner booth two years earlier, the same steady weight he’d offered her before either of them had understood what they were building.
“We don’t have to manage the size of it,” he said.
“I’ve spent most of my life keeping my happiness small enough to survive losing it.
I don’t want to do that with this one. I’d rather feel all of it, and take whatever risk comes with that, than spend nine months guarding against a grief that hasn’t happened yet.
” Jennie looked at him — this careful, precise man who had spent eleven years building walls around exactly this kind of vulnerability, choosing, deliberately, to tear them down for something that couldn’t yet even hold its own head up — and felt something in her chest loosen that she hadn’t fully realized was still braced. “Okay,” she said softly.
“All of it, then. No guarding.” “No guarding,” he agreed, and lifted her hand to press a kiss against her knuckles, right beside the ring he’d given her on one knee, right beside the promise that had started it all.
The weeks that followed unfolded in small, quiet increments of joy that Jennie found herself hoarding like treasure — the first time nausea hit hard enough that Lin Xing appeared at her elbow with crackers before she’d even finished being sick, having apparently researched exactly which foods helped and stocked the pantry accordingly without saying a word about it; the Sunday afternoon they spent at a furniture store “just looking,” which ended, three hours later, with a crib ordered and Lin Xing engaged in a passionate, entirely unnecessary debate with a salesperson about the structural integrity of a particular changing table; the evening Jennie caught him at the piano, playing something new and unfamiliar, slow and gentle, and asked what it was.
“Nothing yet,” he admitted, a little sheepish.
“I’ve been composing something. For them.
It isn’t finished. I’m not entirely sure it will ever qualify as finished — I keep adding to it.
” “Play what you have.” He did, hands moving carefully over the keys, the melody unfinished and imperfect and entirely his own, nothing like the practiced nocturnes she’d first heard through a shared wall two years earlier.
Jennie sat on the piano bench beside him, one hand resting lightly on her still barely-there stomach, and listened to a lullaby being built one Sunday at a time for a person who didn’t exist yet outside of a heartbeat on a screen and the enormous, undefended love of two people who had already decided, completely, to give everything to them.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, when he finally stopped.
“It’s unfinished.” “So are we, in a way.
I think that’s allowed.” He considered that, fingers still resting on the keys, and something in his face settled into the particular calm she’d come to recognize as him arriving, quietly, at a decision he intended to keep.
“I'd like it to be the first thing they ever hear,” he said. “After your voice.
I’ve read that hearing develops around eighteen weeks.
I intend to play this every single day until then, so that by the time they can hear anything at all, it’s already familiar.
” “That’s either the most romantic thing you’ve ever said, or the most medically specific. ” “I fail to see why it can’t be both.”
Jennie laughed, leaned into his shoulder, and let him play the unfinished melody through once more — a lullaby still being written, for the small heartbeat they’d only just met, in an apartment that had, over two quiet years, become the safest place either of them had ever known.
It was beautiful, and unfinished, and entirely theirs — and for the length of one ordinary Sunday, that was everything.