Chapter 26
ARTUR
The receptionist looks at the six men behind me, then at Katie.
We arrived seventeen minutes early because the alternate route contained road construction. I considered calling the city before Katie explained that municipal employees rarely move concrete barriers for prenatal anxiety, even when threatened.
During the drive, she held the appointment folder across her stomach. Four days have passed since the second explosion, none of them offering more than fragments of sleep.
The casino investigation has produced twelve names with access to the inspection procedure, each connected to another layer of staff, contractors, or family. I placed the list outside my mind for this hour; it waits there anyway.
“Are they all coming into the examination room?” she asks.
“No,” Katie says.
“Two,” I say at the same time, making Katie turn her head slowly.
The prenatal clinic occupies the third floor of a medical building whose blank stone exterior reveals nothing about the futures discussed inside.
Beyond gated parking and two elevators, the waiting area has been softened with pale green walls, watercolor leaves, and framed newborn portraits chosen to make fear feel impolite.
I notice instead that the windows face an exposed roof and both elevators open into the same corridor.
I compromise by leaving Niko at the vehicle entrance.
Boris refuses to count himself as security even while wearing a gun beneath his jacket.
“One husband is already excessive,” Katie tells the receptionist. “The others remain outside.”
The woman relaxes and slides the paperwork across the counter. I send every guard except Boris to the hall, but when Katie points toward the same door, he follows them without argument.
“You enjoy stripping me of personnel,” I say.
“Only in medical offices. Elsewhere, I prefer stripping you of clothing.”
The receptionist becomes fascinated by her keyboard.
We take two chairs beneath a window filmed with soft morning light.
Around us, low music, turning magazine pages, and the receptionist’s keyboard create a practiced calm, while every photographed infant appears offensively certain of survival.
Katie fills out the history forms as I review the questions on my phone.
They begin with bleeding risks and medication interactions before moving to patient-record security along with emergency transfer routes, leaving thirty-eight items after she deleted twelve before breakfast.
“You put kidnapping beneath common pregnancy symptoms,” she says.
“The heading is potential risks.”
“You also included whether the examination table has a weight limit.”
“Equipment failure is preventable.”
Katie looks down at herself. Her sweater follows the soft curve of her breasts before falling loose over a stomach that remains flat. “Are you expecting me to become an elephant by lunch?”
“I expect the furniture to meet its published limits.”
“The furniture has my sympathies.”
Katie finishes the health history, then pauses above the emergency-contact line.
“Do I put you or Boris?”
“Me.”
“Boris answers his phone.”
“I answered the clinic before the first ring.”
“You frightened the scheduler. She apologized for calling.”
I take the form and write my number. “She recovered.”
Katie retrieves it, and her fingers remain around mine for a moment longer than necessary.
“I’m scared,” she says beneath the waiting-room music.
The admission removes humor from the space between us.
“So am I.”
She searches my face, perhaps expecting a qualification, but I offer none.
“Good,” she says. “I’d hate to be the only sensible person here.”
The nurse calls her name before I can improve the list.
I follow Katie through a pale corridor where artificial lavender attempts to soften antiseptic and rounded watercolor shapes float along the walls.
Behind closed doors, machines operate with a steady electric whine; the quiet hangs suspended, full of private answers arriving for other families.
None of my authority can alter what waits in those rooms, and the realization is deeply unpleasant.
The clinician introduces herself as Dr. Shah and washes her hands before sitting across from us. She is small, calm, entirely unimpressed by the file Boris prepared on her education.
She asks Katie about bleeding, cramping, medication, then the frequency of the nausea. I allow Katie to answer without correcting the number of crackers she kept down yesterday. The restraint should count as evidence of personal growth.
When Dr. Shah asks about alcohol, Katie says she hasn’t had any since learning she was pregnant, her voice remaining steady.
Mine does too when I disclose the explosion, stress, and possible smoke exposure.
The doctor asks specific questions before explaining that Katie’s brief time outdoors at the triage boundary is unlikely to have caused harm.
I hear unlikely as an invitation to further investigation, but Katie squeezes my hand before I begin.
“Based on the date of your last period, you’re approximately six weeks and three days,” she tells Katie. “That agrees with the timing you gave us.”
The first safe-house night returns with inconvenient detail when Katie’s eyes meet mine, bringing color into her cheeks.
Dr. Shah explains that an internal ultrasound provides the clearest image this early, and after Katie agrees, I stand beside the examination table while she changes beneath a paper drape. When the lights dim, I keep my hand around hers.
The monitor wakes in shades of black and silver, a private universe without edges.
At first I understand nothing; shadows shift with each adjustment of the probe, pale shapes gathering and dissolving before my eyes can hold them.
Katie’s fingers tighten around mine while the machine emits a low electrical whine far too ordinary for the terror moving through my blood.
Somewhere inside that storm of gray, our future already exists, though I still don’t know how to recognize it.
I watch the doctor’s face instead of the monitor, turning every pause into a warning and the slight movement between her eyebrows into a diagnosis. When she changes the angle, my pulse strikes against the inside of my throat.
Katie feels the tension through my hand and moves her thumb once across my knuckle, offering comfort that should have traveled from me to her.
“There,” Dr. Shah says. “The pregnancy is intrauterine.”
She points to a dark oval surrounded by pale tissue, and relief weakens my knees hard enough that I lock them before Katie notices.
Dr. Shah enlarges the image until a shape smaller than a grain of rice appears inside the oval, with a rapid flicker moving within it.
“That is cardiac activity.”
The room becomes very quiet as Katie releases a broken breath, and I lift her hand to my mouth because speech has become unreliable. The clinician moves the image sideways until another dark curve appears, then pauses.
“What is that?” Katie asks.
Dr. Shah studies the screen before answering. “A second gestational sac.”
My mind accepts the sentence one word at a time.
Second.
Another tiny shape rests inside it, with another bright pulse flashing rapidly.
“Twins,” Katie whispers.
Dr. Shah doesn’t respond because her attention has shifted toward the far edge of the image.
She adjusts the angle again, and when a third black oval slides into view, my hand begins shaking around Katie’s.
“No,” Katie says softly. “That can’t be another one.”
The clinician measures the sac, finds the minute embryo within it, then receives an answer from a third flicker on the screen.
“There are three,” she says. “Three separate gestational sacs, three embryos, with cardiac activity in each.”
Dr. Shah labels them A, B, and C, placing the letters beside measurements that mean nothing to me until she says each corresponds closely to the dates. She shifts between the images until the third can no longer be mistaken for a reflection or an artifact created by the machine.
Katie asks her to count again, so Dr. Shah moves through the image until three sacs show three embryos, each with its own rapid point of light.
After the doctor stops, I trace them in sequence, following the first on the left side of the image to the second resting slightly higher. The third appears near the far border, small enough that I might have overlooked it if the flicker didn’t insist on being seen.
Misha would have laughed until he couldn’t breathe, and he would have accused me of treating conception like territorial expansion, then bought three painted nesting dolls from the immigrant shops along Buford Highway, too large for newborn hands and selected purely to annoy me.
The joy of imagining him here strikes against grief without either feeling diminishing the other, leaving me to wish he had lived to become an uncle.
My watch suddenly weighs too much, so I remove it with fingers that fail twice at the clasp, then place it on the counter before I drop it.
The number has always meant structure through routes out of a building, cars in a secure convoy, or men positioned so no approach remains unobserved. On the monitor, it means three lights beating in darkness.
Katie stares at the screen while tears move silently into her hair.
“Your efficient criminal empire has become too literal,” she says.
The laugh leaves me without dignity and breaks in the middle, turning into a sound I’d kill any man for hearing outside this room before tears run down my face.
I press Katie’s hand against my mouth while three fragile pulses continue beyond the glass, unable to force a sentence through my throat.
Dr. Shah gives us a minute before continuing the measurements, and the printer begins producing images beside the monitor, each sheet emerging slowly with pale curves that would mean nothing to anyone outside this room.
I want every copy before the machine is erased after we leave, because joy and suspicion now share every doorway in my life.