15. Charlotte Gallagher #2
I don’t know how she felt about it either. Whether she was happy, overwhelmed, surprised. Whether this baby had been planned or whether it changed everything the second she saw those lines appear.
Another person on the yacht. Another life that never made it here with us.
I sit quietly with that thought.
Dane’s hand settles over mine and stays there. We sit quietly like that for a while.
“Another sibling gone,” I say eventually.
“Yeah.”
I look down at the ultrasound one last time—the tiny shape curled into itself, barely there at all—before folding the card closed and pushing it aside.
“It’s okay, Char, if you don’t feel like playing anymore.”
The strange thing is that I do feel something. Grief, maybe. Even though there’s no memory attached to it. No face. No voice. Just the knowledge that someone else was supposed to be here and never got the chance.
I take a slow breath and look back at the board.
“I’m okay,” I say softly.
Then I lift my eyes to his.
“Your move.”
We keep playing, and for a while it helps. The structure of it. The simplicity. The board between us is contained and predictable in a way nothing else ever really is.
Pieces shift. Positions change. It’s familiar enough that I can follow it without thinking too deeply.
I let the game fill my head for a little while. And for a time, it works. Then the thought slips back in anyway.
My mother was pregnant.
The image rises again before I can stop it—the small curved shape suspended in gray shadow, something alive and forming that never got the chance to become anything more. Another life that ended before it began.
And beneath that thought, another one starts quietly turning over in my mind.
Five years.
We’ve been careful. Consistent. As precise as we can be with what we have—counting days, tracking cycles, avoiding the windows we think matter. Adjusting when we need to. Paying attention.
And it’s worked.
No missed cycles. No uncertainty. Nothing to suggest we got it wrong.
I’ve always taken that at face value—proof we were being careful enough. But sitting here now, with the ultrasound photo still resting beside the chessboard, something starts shifting uneasily in my mind.
What if it isn’t working?
What if it never has?
I move a piece without really thinking, and Dane takes it immediately.
I glance up. “Can I say something not about chess?”
His attention shifts fully to me. “Always.”
I hesitate for a second, trying to figure out how to explain the thought now that it’s fully formed.
“We’ve been having sex without birth control for over five years,” I say quietly. “We track my fertile days as carefully as we can, but it’s still mostly guesswork.”
My fingers twist together in my lap.
“And in all that time…” I look down at my hands. “We’ve never had a pregnancy scare. Not once.”
He doesn’t answer right away. He just lets the thought sit between us, the way he always does when he’s actually thinking something through instead of reacting to it.
“That could just mean the tracking’s working.”
“It could.” I hold his gaze. “Or it could mean something else.”
His expression shifts. “Like what?”
I hesitate before saying it out loud. “Do you think something might be wrong with me?”
He answers immediately. “No, Charlotte.”
“But don’t you think it’s strange? Five years of not being exact and nothing’s ever happened.”
“Maybe something’s wrong with me.”
That catches me off guard.
“It takes two people to make a baby,” he says. “It’s not all on you.”
“But for you there’s nothing that would suggest—”
“Same for you.” He leans forward, resting his forearms against the table. “Your cycles are regular. They always have been. Nothing’s ever seemed off.”
“That doesn’t mean everything’s working the way it should. It just means nothing obvious is wrong.”
“That’s true, but it’s also all we have to go on. And everything we’ve seen points to normal.”
This isn’t really about tracking or whether we’ve been accurate.
It’s something deeper than that.
“I obviously don’t want to have a baby here. That would be reckless. But back in Australia…” I pause, trying to put the feeling into words. “I think I would want one someday.”
I hold his gaze across the chessboard.
“Would you want to be a father?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah. One day. Under different circumstances.”
His answer settles heavily somewhere deep inside me. Not just the words themselves, but everything attached to them.
“We could never have children together.”
The words leave my mouth quietly, but the second they’re spoken, something changes between us. The mood shifts and doesn’t settle back the same way again.
Dane goes completely still.
We could never have children together.
I hear the words again in my own head, only now they feel different because they’ve been said out loud. Real in a way they weren’t before.
Out there, we are what we are on paper. In records. In every version of the world that decides what people are allowed to be to each other.
Brother and sister.
And beyond that is the part neither of us has ever really touched directly before—the finality of it. The understanding that some doors were never open to us in the first place.
A painful tightness builds in my chest.
Because I want it. Not now. Not here on this island. But someday.
I want to be a mother.
The realization settles into me fully formed, impossible to push away now that it’s here. I want to carry a child. I want that closeness. That feeling of something becoming part of you before the rest of the world even knows it exists.
I think about Mum keeping that ultrasound tucked away, carrying it with her while she waited for the right moment to share it. And suddenly I understand it differently than I ever could before.
The ache of it expands quietly inside me. Because I want it so badly. And there’s nowhere for that want to go.
“We could adopt.”
Typical Dane. The second he sees one door closing, he’s already looking for another way through.
Something tightens in my chest at how quickly he reaches for a solution. How badly he wants to fix this for me.
A small laugh slips out before I can stop it.
“Who’s going to give us a baby?”
He doesn’t answer. There isn’t one. We both know it.
“Let’s focus on getting out of here first. We’ll deal with the rest when the time comes.”
I know what he’s doing. Trying to pull us back from the edge of something neither of us can solve tonight.
And he’s not wrong. There’s nothing more to get from this conversation now.
“Okay,” I say.
He moves a piece on the board.
Small. Subtle. But it opens the board in a way that gives me an advantage I definitely didn’t earn.
I notice immediately and take it anyway.
We keep playing.
The pieces move. The game continues the way it’s supposed to. Dane’s focus stays steady and precise.
Mine keeps drifting somewhere else entirely.