17. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The exam room was cold and clinical and smelled faintly of antiseptic.
I’d been here once before, for the initial confirmation appointment, but that had been different. That had been shock and disbelief and a nurse who’d handed me pamphlets about my options while I sat there trying to remember how breathing worked.
This was the real thing. The first ultrasound. The first time I’d see what was growing inside me, and somehow the presence of Hunt in the chair beside the exam table made it more real than anything had since the positive test.
He was sitting very still, his hands clasped in his lap, his eyes fixed on the blank ultrasound screen.
He’d been quiet since we arrived, answering the intake questions in monosyllables, and I’d watched him decline the offered water twice, his hands shaking slightly as he turned down the nurse’s increasingly concerned attempts to make him comfortable.
Dr. Reyes came in brisk and cheerful and completely unbothered, ten thousand deliveries deep and counting.
“Good morning, Nora. And this must be Dad?”
Hunt’s face folded in on itself at the word Dad. I watched him try to compose himself, try to find the appropriate response, and fail spectacularly.
“Yes,” he managed. “I’m, yes. Dad.”
“Wonderful. Let’s take a look at this baby, shall we?”
The gel was cold on my stomach. I flinched at the contact, and Hunt’s hand twitched toward mine before he caught himself and pulled back, remembering the rules.
The technician positioned the wand, adjusted the angle, and suddenly there was sound.
Fast and rhythmic and unmistakable.
A heartbeat.
I heard Hunt make a noise beside me. Not a word, not quite a sob, just a sound that seemed to come from somewhere past his ability to control.
I turned my head and found him gripping the edge of the exam table so hard his knuckles had gone white, tears streaming down his face, his entire body shaking with the effort of staying upright.
He was crying.
Silently, catastrophically, all his walls crumbling at once. The tears cut tracks through the composure he’d been maintaining for weeks, and he didn’t try to hide them, didn’t turn away, just sat there and let them fall while that tiny heartbeat filled the room.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was wrecked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t expect, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize for crying,” Dr. Reyes said gently. “Happens all the time.”
“It’s just, that’s our, that’s really.” He couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t find words for what he was feeling. I watched him struggle with it, watched him break apart and try to reassemble himself, and the seal on my chest cracked despite my best efforts to keep it closed.
“That’s really our baby,” I finished for him.
He nodded, tears still falling.
The technician pointed out the relevant features: the head, the body, the flutter of the heartbeat we could hear.
I listened and nodded and tried to focus, but I kept getting distracted by the man beside me, by the way his hands were shaking, by the way he was looking at the screen like he’d never seen anything more miraculous.
“Do you have any questions?” Dr. Reyes asked when the examination was complete.
Hunt reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a notebook.
I stared.
It was a small leather-bound journal, the kind you’d buy at a fancy stationery store, and it was filled with handwriting.
Tabs stuck out from the edges. Yellow highlighter showed through the pages.
And when Hunt opened it to a specific section, I saw numbered questions written in his blocky all-caps.
“Question one,” he read, his voice still rough from crying. “What supplements should she be taking, and are there any that interact negatively with her current medications?”
Dr. Reyes blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“She’s not on any regular medications that I know of, but I wanted to confirm.
Question two: what’s the recommended weight gain trajectory for someone with her frame and activity level?
Question three: are there any restrictions on her work activities, specifically regarding lifting, exposure to animal medications, or emergency response situations? ”
He kept going.
Fourteen questions total, each one numbered, each one clearly researched, each one asked with a raw, desperate earnestness, as if preparing obsessively for the future could make up for the past he couldn’t fix.
Dr. Reyes answered every single one.
I sat there on the exam table with gel still drying on my stomach and watched my husband take notes, watched him write down every word the doctor said, watched him ask follow-up questions that revealed just how much he’d already read.
He’d studied. There was a highlighter involved. There were tabs.
“Last question,” Hunt said finally. “Can we get a printout of the ultrasound?”
“Of course.” Dr. Reyes handed him the small black-and-white image. “Standard procedure.”
Hunt took it like it was a legal document. Held it carefully by the edges. Studied it a long time, and gave me nothing.
Then he looked at me.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For letting me be here.”
I had no answer for that. Not one I could say out loud.
The drive back was quiet.
Hunt held the ultrasound printout in his lap the entire time, his thumb tracing the edge of it absently, his eyes distant with whatever he was thinking.
I watched the road and tried not to think about the way he’d cried.
The way he’d come prepared. The way he was treating this like the most important job he’d ever been given.
He dropped me at my house without asking to come in.
“Thank you again,” he said as I got out of the truck. “For today.”
“You asked good questions.”
“I read a book.” He looked almost embarrassed. “Three books, actually. I wasn’t sure which one was best.”
I stood there with my hand on the truck door, looking at this man I’d married and left and couldn’t figure out anymore.
“I’ll see you at the clinic, Hunt.”
“I’ll bring the notebook.”
I went inside.
At 11 p.m., I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, when the craving hit.
Pickles.
Not just any pickles. Pickles with specific characteristics I couldn’t articulate but knew I needed. The craving was irrational and overwhelming and exactly the kind of pregnancy symptom I’d read about but hadn’t quite believed would happen to me.
I stared at the ceiling for fifteen minutes.
Then I picked up my phone and typed one word:
Pickles.
I sent it to Hunt before I could talk myself out of it.
Mostly as a test, I told myself. To see what he’d do. To see if he meant all those promises about being present and helpful and available.
He didn’t respond.
I told myself I wasn’t disappointed. Told myself it was late and he was probably asleep and I should just drive to the twenty-four-hour gas station two towns over and get my own damn pickles.
Twenty minutes later, headlights appeared in my driveway.
I watched from the bedroom window as Hunt got out of his truck in the rain, pulled a paper bag from the passenger seat, and walked up to my porch. He was soaking wet by the time he reached the door, his hair plastered to his forehead, his shirt clinging to his chest.
I went downstairs and opened the door before he could knock.
He stood there on my grandmother’s porch, dripping wet, holding a paper bag like it contained a live heart.
“I wasn’t sure which kind.” His voice was apologetic. “So I got four.”
He handed me the bag. Inside were four different jars of pickles: dill, bread and butter, spicy, sweet gherkins. Underneath them was a pint of ice cream. And at the bottom, a package of saltines.
“I remembered you said saltines helped with the nausea,” he explained. “The ice cream was, I don’t know, it seemed like pickles and ice cream was a thing. Is that not a thing? The book mentioned cravings but it wasn’t specific about combinations.”
I looked at the bag. Looked at him. Looked at the rain coming down behind him, at the way he was shivering slightly, at the way he wasn’t asking to come inside.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
He stood there for a moment longer, rain dripping from his hair, waiting. Permission, maybe. Or dismissal.
“Goodnight, Nora.”
“Goodnight, Hunt.”
He turned and walked back to his truck.
From the mudroom window, Waffles bellowed threats at his retreating figure, outraged that the enemy had dared approach the fortress. Hunt didn’t react, just got in his truck and drove away, and I stood in my grandmother’s doorway holding four jars of pickles and watching his taillights disappear.
I ate pickles at midnight.
Dill, specifically. The spicy ones had been too much for my uncertain stomach, but the dill were perfect, exactly what I’d been craving without knowing it. I ate them sitting at the kitchen table in his flannel, the one I’d stolen from his closet before I left, and never once admitted to owning.
I hadn’t meant to keep it, or to wear it, or to find comfort in the soft, worn fabric that reminded me of a time when things were simpler.
But here I was. Midnight, a jar of pickles, and his shirt.
The warmth in my chest was unwelcome and undeniable.
My phone rang while I was rinsing pickle juice off my fingers.
I answered without looking, because it was midnight and the only person who called me at midnight anymore had just driven off into the rain.
“Nora. Oh, thank God you picked up.” Not Hunt. A woman’s voice, smooth and instantly, sickeningly familiar. “It’s Sasha. Don’t hang up. I only need a minute.”
Every muscle in my body went to stone.
“How did you get this number.”
“You never changed it. That’s so like you.
You always did trust people longer than they deserved.
” A soft laugh, the one she used to aim across foundation galas.
“I thought you should hear it from a friend. Vivian’s been to the family lawyers, sweetheart.
Twice. Anderson babies don’t get raised in falling-down farmhouses, and Hunt’s never once in his life told his mother no.
” She let a pause open up, the practiced kind.
“They’re drafting papers. He hasn’t told you, has he.
That’s what I thought. He’s very good at deciding what you don’t need to know. ”
I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen in his flannel and let the old cold come up my spine, the exact cold I’d felt in a hospital waiting room while a state trooper called this woman somebody else’s wife.
“Sasha.”
“Yes, honey?”
“Lose the number.”
I hung up. Then I blocked it. Then I stood there a lot longer than blocking a number should take, because she’d done the thing she’d called to do.
She’d put the doubt back in the room. They’re drafting papers.
It didn’t matter that Hunt had never once said the word custody, or that his mother had driven out here on Nora’s side before he’d even found me.
It didn’t matter that I’d watched him turn into someone new.
The seed was in, small and patient, and I hated her for knowing exactly where to plant it.
The next morning, I told June everything.
She listened without interrupting, her hands wrapped around a coffee mug, her face carefully neutral.
I told her all of it, in order, and hated how much of it was good: the ultrasound and the crying and the notebook of fourteen questions, the midnight text and the rain and the four kinds of pickles, eating them in his flannel and hating myself for the warmth I couldn’t seem to kill.
When I finished, June was quiet for a while.
Then she said, mild as milk: “You’re going to want to figure out what you’re doing, honey.”
“I know what I’m doing. I’m protecting myself.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.” The word came out sharper than I intended.
“He broke me, June. He broke me and I left and I built a whole new life, and now he’s here being perfect and helpful and crying at ultrasounds, and I don’t know how to reconcile that with the man who made me feel invisible for the better part of two years. ”
“People can be both things.” June’s voice was gentle. “They can hurt you and also love you. They can fail and also try to do better. That doesn’t mean you have to forgive them, but it does mean you have to decide what you actually want.”
“I don’t have a clue what I want.”
“I think you do.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I think you know exactly what you want, and it scares you half to death.”
I didn’t answer.
“That man is not leaving.” June’s voice was firm now, certain. “He’s taking every humiliation this town throws at him, and he’s showing up to every appointment, and he’s driving through the rain at midnight with four kinds of pickles because you sent him one word. He’s not leaving, Nora.”
“Believe me, I’ve noticed.”
“And you don’t want him to.”
I closed my eyes. Felt the truth of it settle into my bones, heavy and terrifying and undeniable.
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t.”
“Then figure out what that means. Before this baby comes. Before you spend any more time in limbo.” June stood up and carried her mug to the sink. “You can’t keep him at arm’s length forever. Eventually you’re going to have to let him in or let him go.”
I sat at my kitchen table for a long time after she left.
Thinking about what June had said, let him in or let him go, and about a man who showed up every single time I gave him permission to, and what it’d mean to stop needing him to ask.
About what it’d mean to trust him again.
And what it’d cost if I couldn’t.