19. Beatrice
— ? —
Beatrice
The waiting room of the OB office has never felt smaller.
I’ve been here a dozen times now, but today the walls seem to press in, the cheerful posters about prenatal vitamins and breastfeeding tips suddenly overwhelming in their relentless optimism. My knee won’t stop bouncing. My hands won’t stop fidgeting with the hem of my shirt.
Kenneth sits beside me, and he’s not much better. His leg keeps jiggling. He’s checked his phone twice - not to answer anything, just to have something to do with his hands - and put it away both times without looking at it.
“What do you think?” I ask, mostly to break the silence.
“About what?”
“Boy or girl.”
He considers the question like it’s the most important thing anyone’s ever asked him. “I don’t have a preference. As long as they’re healthy.”
“You said that already. At lunch with Ralphie.”
“I meant it then too.”
“He called it a cop-out answer.”
“He was right.” Kenneth’s mouth quirks. “But what am I supposed to say? That I’ve been lying awake every night imagining both possibilities? That I’ve already pictured teaching a son how to sail and teaching a daughter how to read financial statements?”
“You’d teach a daughter to read financial statements?”
“I’d teach either of them whatever they wanted to learn.” He pauses. “But if you’re forcing me to guess? I think it’s a girl. With your eyes and your stubbornness and your complete inability to let anyone help you with anything.”
“I let people help me.”
“Name one time.”
I open my mouth. Close it.
He grins.
“Mrs. Sinclair?”
The nurse is standing in the doorway, holding a clipboard, smiling like she knows exactly what we’re about to find out. Kenneth takes my hand as we stand, and I let him, our fingers intertwining like they always used to before everything went wrong.
The ultrasound room is dim and cool. I lie back on the table, the paper crinkling beneath me, and the technician - a different one from last time, younger, with a cheerful ponytail - squeezes gel onto my belly.
“Ready to find out what you’re having?”
Kenneth’s hand tightens around mine. I can feel his pulse racing through his palm.
“Ready,” I say.
The wand presses against my skin. The screen flickers to life.
And there’s our baby.
So much bigger now than the first ultrasound. Moving, stretching, a whole person in there with arms and legs and tiny fingers curling and uncurling. I can see the curve of a cheek, the shape of a nose, the rapid flutter of a heartbeat.
“Everything looks perfect,” the technician says, moving the wand, adjusting angles. “Good development. Strong heartbeat. Very active today.”
“Gets that from her mother,” Kenneth murmurs.
“Her?” The technician raises an eyebrow. “Are you guessing, or did someone already tell you?”
“Guessing.” But his voice wavers.
The technician smiles. Moves the wand one more time, peers at the screen.
“Well,” she says, “your guess is correct. It’s a girl.”
A girl.
A daughter.
My hand flies to my mouth. The room blurs behind sudden tears.
Beside me, Kenneth goes completely still.
“A girl?” His voice is barely a whisper. Cracked. Raw. “We’re having a daughter?”
“You’re having a daughter. Congratulations.”
And then Kenneth breaks.
Not the quiet tears from the first time he heard the heartbeat, when he squeezed my hand and let a few drops fall. This is something else entirely. Real, shuddering sobs that shake his whole body. He bends forward in his chair, face in his hands, shoulders heaving.
“Kenneth-” I reach for him.
“I’m sorry.” He can’t stop crying. Can’t catch his breath. “I’m sorry, I just-” He looks up at me, eyes red, face transformed into something I’ve never seen before. “A daughter. We’re having a daughter.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to be a father. To a little girl.”
“I know.”
He pulls me toward him as much as the ultrasound setup allows, his arms around me, his tears soaking into my shirt. The technician quietly excuses herself to give us privacy, and I hold him while he falls apart.
“I’m going to do everything right,” he says against my shoulder. “I swear. Everything my father did wrong, everything I did wrong, I’m going to fix it. For her. For you. For all of us.”
“I know you will.”
“She’s never going to wonder if I love her. She’s never going to feel like she’s not enough. She’s never going to-” His voice breaks. “I’m going to be better. I have to be better.”
“You already are.” I cup his face in my hands, make him look at me. “Kenneth. You already are.”
We stay there for a long time, holding each other, until the tears slow and the shaking stops and we’re just two people breathing together in a dim room with their daughter’s image frozen on the screen.
The drive home is quiet.
Kenneth keeps glancing at me, at my belly, at the road, like he can’t decide what needs the most attention. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel.
“I keep thinking about my father,” he finally says. “About what a terrible example he set. About how scared I am that I’ll turn into him.”
“You’re not him.”
“I almost was.” His jaw tightens. “That dinner. The things I said. The way I looked at you. I became exactly what I swore I’d never be - a man who destroys the woman he loves because he’s too afraid to trust her.”
“But you stopped.” I reach over, put my hand on his arm. “You realized what you were doing. You’ve spent months trying to make it right.”
“Have I been trying hard enough?”
I think about the amends he’s made. The therapy sessions. The way he shows up now, present and attentive, without his phone or his distractions or his mother’s voice in his ear.
“Yes,” I say quietly. “You’ve been trying hard enough.”
He pulls into the driveway. Puts the car in park. Doesn’t move to get out.
“She’s going to be amazing,” he says. “Our daughter. She’s going to be smart like you and stubborn like you and she’s going to drive me absolutely crazy and I’m going to love every second of it.”
“And what’s she going to get from you?”
He considers this. “Hopefully nothing. Hopefully she gets everything from you and I just get to watch her become whoever she’s meant to be.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I know.” He turns to face me. “But I want it to be. I want her to be free of all the Sinclair baggage. All the expectations and the legacy and the poison. I want her to just be… ours. Beatrice and Kenneth’s daughter. Not a Sinclair heir.”
I lean over. Kiss him softly.
“She’ll be both,” I say against his lips. “And that’s okay. Because we’re going to teach her that being a Sinclair can mean something different. Something better.”
That night, I call him.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“About what?” His voice is warm, sleepy. Happy in a way I haven’t heard in years.
“About tomorrow. And the next day. And all the days after that.” I pause, trying to find the words. “I’m having your daughter, Kenneth. Our daughter. And I don’t want to do it alone.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know yet.” I take a breath. “But I think… I think I want to find out. I think I want to see what we could be, if we really tried. If we didn’t give up.”
“Bea-”
“Don’t say anything. Not tonight. Just… come by tomorrow. We can talk about what this means. What we want it to mean.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I know you will.”
I hang up. Lie back against the pillows, my hand on my belly, feeling our daughter shift and kick.
“I think I’m going to let him back in,” I whisper to her. “God help me, but I think I am.”