Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
After the picnic, Reese washed her work shirt in the bathroom sink, wrung it out, and hung it over the shower rod.
Then she sat on the end of the bed with her notebook and checked her budget.
Rent, paid through the end of the month.
Gas. Groceries. The phone. At the bottom of the page, she underlined the prenatal visit and the clinic number.
She hadn't ignored the pregnancy. She'd been taking prenatal vitamins since the week she found out, reading what she could at the library, eating as well as her budget allowed, and doing the math over and over.
The doctor was different.
The first visit cost money she didn't have.
So would the labs, the follow-ups, and whatever else came after she finally got through the door.
Her insurance was still Wade's plan, and using it would tell him where she was.
Paying cash kept him out of it, but she still could barely afford to feed herself.
She'd been thinking about it since Axel mentioned it at the lake.
He knew about Wade. He knew she was pregnant.
He'd learned the things she'd spent months hiding from everyone, and he hadn't pushed, judged, or tried to take control.
He'd rowed her across the lake, helped her catch a fish, cooked for her, kissed her at her door, and left like nothing about her situation changed how he felt.
It felt like a relief, but it was a feeling she couldn't let herself trust. Wade had also made her feel safe, just long enough to trap her.
But Axel wasn't Wade. He was a shifter, and she was his fated mate.
She looked at the clinic number again. The pregnancy had lived inside her for months, private and half-hidden under loose shirts. At the appointment, it would become real in a different way, with a heartbeat, measurements, and maybe an image of the baby on a screen.
She wanted Axel there, and that scared her more than anything.
If he only liked the idea of her, or if the baby made him hesitate, she would see it there. She'd spent four years learning how to read a man's expressions. She'd be able to read Axel's. Reese picked up her phone before she could talk herself out of it.
I'm going to call the clinic tomorrow, she typed. For the prenatal appointment.
She stared at the message. Then she added the harder part.
Would you come with me?
Yes. No hesitation.
She plugged the phone in and lay in the dark. The lightness in her chest made her uneasy, because relief had never come without a cost before.
The women's clinic was located on the ground floor of Fate Mountain General.
Reese had called on her break the day before and taken the first appointment they could give her.
She arrived early with the cash in her wallet, and Axel was already in the waiting room when she got there, holding a pamphlet about infant car seats.
"There's more to car seats than I thought," he said as she sat beside him. "The chest clip is supposed to sit higher than most people put it. Apparently, a lot of people get that wrong."
"Good to know," she said, feeling nervous.
He turned it over and kept reading, while Reese completed the intake form the receptionist had handed her. Name, Reese Walker. Address, P.O. Box 214. Insurance, none, self-pay. She ticked the box, her hand tightening on the pen.
"Walker?" the nurse said from the doorway.
Reese stood at the sound of her name, and the nurse looked past her shoulder. "Dad coming back too?"
She watched him for the flinch. He set the pamphlet on the side table and stood, his face calm and focused. Reese said, "Yes."
After the nurse took her vitals and asked her a battery of questions, she suggested a pelvic exam and an ultrasound today. Axel feigned a need to use the restroom while Reese got a brief pelvic exam. After that, they met in the hall and were ushered to an ultrasound room.
The room was small and dim. An exam table sat beneath a folded paper sheet. The ultrasound monitor was mounted on a swing arm beside it. The air carried the faint scent of disinfectant and the low hum of the machine.
The tech was a broad, cheerful woman named Dee with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She told Reese to lie back and get comfortable. Axel stopped just inside the door, hands loose, waiting instead of assuming.
Reese motioned for him to come stand next to the table. He came over while Dee prepared the equipment. Reese pulled her shirt up over the small bump she had been hiding and lay exposed in the dim room. Her pulse climbed with anticipation. Axel's hand found hers, and she gripped it.
Dee spread the cold gel across Reese's skin. "A little pressure now," she said, working the wand into her belly. "There we go."
The screen filled with moving gray, cloudlike static that looked like weather patterns. Then shapes emerged from the blur: a spine, a curled back, the round of a head, one fist tucked up by the face like a sleeping boxer.
"There she is," Dee said and started clicking measurements. "And here's the heartbeat."
Sound filled the room. The rapid thrum of a tiny heartbeat, so quick it almost blurred into itself. "A hundred and fifty to the minute," Dee said. "Right where it should be." Reese had read about this in the library stacks. The book had not mentioned that hearing it would take her breath away.
Axel's eyes were on the screen, and his jaw was tight. He seemed to have forgotten everything in the room except the image on the screen. She had come to catch him pretending. She had caught him in a real, unguarded moment instead.
She squeezed his hand.
"Measurements all look great," Dee said. "Sixteen weeks, so we'll put you at the last week of November. Feeling movement?"
"Flutters for about a week now."
"That'll be kicks before long." Dee angled the wand, watched her screen, and smiled at it. "Do you want to know the sex?"
Axel looked at Reese. "Do you want to know?" he asked.
"Yes," Reese said.
"It's a girl."
A girl. The baby had been a blur on a test strip, a flutter low in her belly. Now she had a face-shaped shadow with a fist tucked up by her cheek, a due date, and a sex. Reese's eyes went hot, and a tear slid down her cheek.
"Pictures?" Dee said, already tearing the strip off the printer.
"Two," Axel said. "If you can."
Reese looked up at him, examining his face in the dark. Dee ran the printer again. Reese watched him take his copy. He gazed at it and slid it into the inside pocket of his jeans.
"A girl," he said, smiling at her. "Her mother's daughter."
At the front desk she counted out the cost of the visit from the cash in her wallet. Before she could place them on the counter, Axel slid a card to the receptionist. Reese looked at him.
She didn't say anything. They'd been playing husband and wife. Protesting after all that would make it weird. The receptionist ran the card. Axel signed the slip and tucked the pen back into its cup. Reese shoved her cash back in her wallet.
Outside, Main Street carried on with its ordinary morning traffic past the hospital. They stood on the sidewalk, and she still had the sonogram strip in her hand.
"Thank you for coming," she said, unable to articulate anything else.
"I need you to know something, Reese. I said it after the picnic, and I need to say it again. I'm committed to you and to her. She's part of you. And you are my mate."
His words landed hard enough that she had to look away.
She stared across the street at a woman wrestling a stroller out of a sedan, at a delivery truck double-parked by the pharmacy, at anything that wasn't him.
Her throat hurt. The sonogram strip crackled as she slid it into her purse. She folded her arms across her chest.
For months she had carried all of this alone.
Every doctor's visit she couldn't make. Every bill she couldn't pay.
Every night she woke up in a cold sweat and had to remind herself she was safe.
She had gotten used to bracing for impact.
Used to assuming that if things got difficult enough, she could always run.
But he'd shown up early and saved her a seat in the waiting room. He hadn't flinched when the nurse called him Dad. He'd taken that sonogram like it was precious. And when he talked about her and the baby, he sounded like he was in it for good.
Reese let out a breath. She wanted to believe him because he kept doing the right things, even when no one was watching. Reese knew enough about shifters to at least trust that the one in front of her was the man he kept showing himself to be. For now.