in which I could see a faint reflection of myself. It reminded me of the windows that night at The Shard, when Eleanor had first fallen ill, and again on the train, where I had stood staring fruitlessly out into the growing dark as hidden scenery sped past us. So much gazing into the unknown.
Maybe I had been going about this all wrong. In judging Freddie’s rapport with Daphne, I’d been searching for a familiar love in his face—a heat and a depth of yearning that resembled the way he’d looked at me, as if that were a benchmark by which all his feelings should be measured. But that passion had also been peppered with guilt and torment, a pleasure that could only also bring him pain. None of that was in his eyes with Daphne, because it didn’t exist with her. She didn’t come with the dark side. Their relationship was fresh, untarnished, uncomplicated.
Heat is wonderful, until it burns you.
* * *
The nurses at Dr. Akhtar’s clinic knew me well by now. Cycle after cycle, I’d come in every two days to get my egg production checked, to make sure everything was proceeding according to plan. We’d made small talk. I’d learned about their own kids, their spouses, the one who was in a complicated throuple with her former neighbors. They treated me like I was a regular person, rather than some fancy royal personage, and were masterful at making me feel their support even when they couldn’t explicitly say it. But when Nick and I walked into the office that afternoon, all the greetings were strictly professional. No one met our eyes.
I knew why. My blood draws had shown the pregnancy hormone level was rising the way it should have, but we’d had this happen once before in our long string of attempts, and the egg that had burrowed into me turned out to be an empty circle. Another victory turned into a loss. Nobody wanted to trade in false hope.
I got undressed and draped my bottom half in the weird half-ply tissue paper they use at doctors’ offices. It scrunched and crunched underneath me as I scooted back onto the examination table and put my feet in the stirrups, Nick assuming his familiar position near my head. I stared at the industrial ceiling. One panel was stained, as if someone crawling around in the vents had spilled a coffee.
“I’m scared,” I whispered. “I don’t feel pregnant. I’m not peeing all the time. My boobs feel fine. What if there’s nothing there?” A tear rolled down my cheek. “I don’t know if I can take that.”
His hand found mine. We didn’t say another word. Not when the tech came in, not when the wand for the vaginal ultrasound went in, not when the photo of my womb filled up the screen.
It wasn’t empty.
Far from it.
Within seconds Dr. Akhtar burst in, as if she’d been waiting on the other side, and grinned broadly when she saw the monitor. “Will you look at that,” she said.
“Twins,” I breathed.
“Identical ones, it seems,” she said, zooming in. We could barely make out two little zigzags inside. “There’s a membrane between them, but they’re sharing a placenta.” She took control of the wand from the tech. “Do you want to hear them?”
“So soon?” I stammered.
“Occasionally,” she said. “Let me just…ah, yes, there.” A wet pulsing sound came through the speakers. “That’s Baby A,” she said. “And that…” She moved, and the noise was replaced by another one. “Is Baby B. Two babies, two heartbeats.”
“Double trouble,” Nick said, gazing in awe at them, then at me.
I covered my mouth with my hands. “Hi, babies,” I cooed. “I hear you. Loud and clear.”
“Get used to loud,” Dr. Akhtar said. “It’s going to be the norm for pretty much the rest of your life now.” She took a few screen grabs and then hit print. “Congratulations. You’ll come back every two weeks for a bit to make sure everything looks good in there, and then we’ll turn you back over to an OB. But for now, after we take your blood again, you can go home and put your feet up and look at your first baby pictures.”
She handed us a stack of small square black-and-white images from the printer. One of them, magnified perfectly, showed the tiniest margins of bodies, curled up and facing each other like minuscule versions of me and Lacey when we’d crawl into one bed and whisper to each other by