Chapter Forty-Five One of Each #2
Jennie went on modified bed rest the following week regardless, unable to fully separate the caution from the memory of everything that had gone wrong before, and Lin Xing rearranged his entire schedule without a single word of complaint, working half his shifts from a laptop propped on their kitchen table so he could be within arm’s reach for anything she needed.
“You don’t have to do this,” Jennie said, watching him review scans on his laptop while simultaneously refilling her water glass without being asked.
“The department can survive without you hovering.” “I’m aware they can survive,” he said.
“I find I have no interest in testing that theory further than necessary.” He set the water down and pressed a kiss to her temple. “I intend to hover, Jennie. I’ve earned the right to be somewhat unreasonable about this, given our history.”
The following growth scan, two weeks later, showed Ella had caught up considerably — not fully level with her brother, but well within the range Dr. Chen described as “nothing at all to worry about.” “She’s stubborn,” Dr. Chen said, smiling at the screen.
“Seems to be catching up entirely on her own terms, in her own time.” “That tracks,” Jennie said, laughing through sudden, relieved tears.
“I think she gets that honestly. From both sides, actually.”
They visited the cemetery one more time before the twins arrived, a quiet Sunday in the final month, Jennie considerably slower now, Lin Xing’s hand steady at her elbow the whole walk from the car.
“We named her Ella,” Jennie told the grave, kneeling as carefully as her changed center of gravity allowed, daisies once again laid beside Lin Xing’s white roses.
“And her brother Eric, for your husband’s father.
I wanted you to know none of this — Ella, Eric, any of it — means we’ve stopped carrying what we lost with us.
There was always room enough. I think we finally understand that all the way through now.
” Lin Xing knelt beside her, one hand resting against the cool grass, and a beat too long neither of them said anything else at all — just knelt together in the quiet, two griefs and two hopes and one enormous, undefended love, all finally sitting comfortably in the same small patch of ground.
“Nearly time,” he said eventually, helping her up, careful of the considerable new weight she carried now for two. “Nearly time,” Jennie agreed, resting a hand on either side of her stomach, feeling the small, distinct movements of a girl and a boy, both of them, impossibly, almost ready to arrive.
Sophia came by the apartment two nights later, ostensibly to drop off a truly alarming quantity of secondhand baby clothes she had been quietly collecting for months, and stayed long after the clothes had been sorted, folded, and admired, curled into the corner of the sofa with a cup of tea she wasn’t drinking.
“Can I tell you something,” she said, “and you have to let me finish it without making it weird, because if you hug me before I’m done I will lose my nerve entirely.”
“I make no promises about the hugging. Go ahead.”
Sophia turned her mug slowly in her hands, uncharacteristically without a joke ready to fill the silence. “I spent a lot of years,” she said, “watching everyone else’s lives happen to them. Not sadly — I want to be clear, I don’t mean it sadly. I liked my life.
I liked being the one who noticed things, who kept the folder, who showed up with the prosecco.
But I used to think that meant I was standing slightly outside of it all.
A very enthusiastic spectator.” She glanced up, something unguarded in her face that Jennie had seen only in glimpses before — at Emma’s dress fitting, at the hospital the night of the miscarriage. “And then I watched you.
From the elephant, practically. Watched you fall for a man who couldn’t say the word ‘colleague’ properly anymore, watched you lose something you weren’t sure you’d survive losing, watched you keep getting back up anyway, one absolutely ordinary Tuesday at a time, until all those ordinary Tuesdays turned into this.
” She gestured, a little helplessly, at the whole warm, cluttered apartment around them — the crib assembled down the hall, the piano, the framed photo, all of it.
“I think I finally understood, somewhere in the middle of watching you, that ordinary days become extraordinary before anyone notices it happening. Including mine.
I don’t think I’ve been standing outside my own life at all. I think I’ve just been slower to notice which days were the ones that would end up mattering.”
Jennie’s eyes had gone bright well before Sophia finished. “Sophia—
“I’m not done. You promised no hugging until I’m done.
” Sophia took a steadying breath. “I met someone. I haven’t told anyone, not even Emma, because I wasn’t sure it was real yet, and because everyone’s been so wrapped up in you two, which — as it should be, I’m not complaining.
But I think it might be real. And I think the reason I let myself notice him at all is because I spent two years watching you and Lin Xing prove that the quiet, unglamorous, Tuesday kind of love is the kind that actually lasts.
I didn’t used to believe that. I believe it now.
” She wiped her eyes, laughing at herself. “Okay. Now you can hug me.”
Jennie was already moving, arms around her before the sentence finished, both of them laughing and crying at once in the specific, wholehearted way that had carried them through everything since a very first, very chaotic day on the ward.
“I want to hear everything about him,” Jennie said, pulling back to look at her properly. “Every detail. The full file, as you’d say.”
“Slowly,” Sophia said, wiping her eyes, “over many, many cups of coffee. I believe that’s the traditional price of admission around here.”
“You’ve been keeping notes on us the entire time, and you know it.”
“I have an excellent spreadsheet. It has room for one more tab.” Sophia squeezed her hand, steadier now, something settled and complete in her face that hadn’t quite been there before.
“Thank you for letting me be a spectator all those years. I don’t think I’ve ever told you it mattered.
It mattered enormously. I think I finally have my own ordinary Tuesday to go be extraordinary in. ”