Chapter 9: First Glimpse
The follow-up room was smaller, warmer. A different kind of quiet. The nurse had given Ava a thin, papery gown and left them alone. The hum of the machine was a low, waiting sound. Lucas stood by the window, looking out at the parking lot asphalt shimmering in the afternoon sun. He couldn’t look at her.
The paper gown rustled as she adjusted herself on the exam table. “You’re thinking too loud over there.”
“I’m not thinking anything.” His voice was flat.
“Liar.” She said it softly, without malice.
He turned then. Her hair was mussed from his hands, a faint pink mark on her neck from his stubble. She looked young and disheveled and impossibly beautiful, sitting there in the clinical light, carrying his child. The child they’d just conceived more fully in a bathroom five minutes ago. A hot wave of shame, immediately followed by a fiercer surge of pride, crashed over him. He didn’t know what to do with either feeling.
“We can’t do that again,” he said, not moving from the window.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s… it’s deranged, Ava. We’re in a doctor’s office.” He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the roots. “And we’re about to see… that.”
“You liked it.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It feels like the point.”
The doctor came in then, a woman with a kind, tired face and a tablet in her hand. She introduced herself, her eyes scanning the screen. “Alright, Ava, let’s take another look, make sure everything’s progressing perfectly after that nice strong heartbeat we saw.”
Ava lay back, the cold gel hitting her skin again. Lucas forced himself to move, to stand by her head, not at her feet. He took her hand. It was cold. He remembered the crushing grip she’d had on him earlier and willed his own to be steady.
The wand moved. The grey static resolved. And there it was.
Not just a peanut. A form. A profile. A perfectly rounded head, a nub of a nose. A spine like a delicate string of pearls. And the tiny, paddle-like hands. As they watched, one hand floated up, fingers splaying, then curling in, as if grasping for something only it could see.
“There’s the hand,” the doctor said pleasantly, clicking a button to capture the image. “Beautiful morphology.”
Ava’s breath caught. Lucas felt the air leave his own lungs. It was one thing to know. It was another to see the articulation of a wrist, the suggestion of a knuckle.
Then the sound filled the room. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. A rapid, determined gallop. A tiny horse running in place inside her. A life. Their life.
Lucas’s throat closed. His vision blurred at the edges. He stared at the screen, at the curve of the head, the slope of the nose in profile.
“Christ,” he whispered, the word torn raw from somewhere deep in his chest. “I can see you in its face already.”
Ava turned her head on the paper-covered pillow to look at him. Her eyes were wide, glistening. “Me?”
“The line here,” he said, his voice thick, pointing a shaking finger near the screen without touching it. “The forehead. It’s yours.”
The doctor smiled, mistaking his emotion for generic paternal wonder. “They often take after one parent more in these early images. It’s a strong profile.”
The wand moved again, measuring, calculating. Lucas couldn’t hear the numbers. He was trapped in that silhouette. A fusion. His secret history with Riley, all that unresolved teenage longing, and then this—this lightning strike with Ava, this scandal, this baby—it all condensed into that grey, pulsating shape on the screen. He saw Ava’s stubborn brow. He thought he saw his own father’ chin. He saw a future of explaining, of hurt, of his old life incinerating.
And he wanted it. With a ferocity that terrified him, he wanted this baby. He wanted Ava. The wanting was a physical ache, worse than the need that had driven him to take her in the bathroom. This was a need to build something, to claim it in the light.
“Everything looks excellent,” the doctor said, wiping the gel from Ava’s stomach. “You can get dressed. The nurse will be in with your paperwork and the images.”
She left. The silence swelled back, but it was different now. The ghost was made flesh. Or almost-flesh.
Ava sat up, clutching the gown to her chest. She looked at the blank screen, then at him. “Lucas.”
He moved. In two strides he was before her, on his knees, his face pressed against her bare belly, his arms wrapped around her waist. He didn’t cry. He just held on, breathing in the scent of her skin and the antiseptic gel. She cradled his head, her fingers in his hair.
“We have to tell them,” he said, his voice muffled against her skin. “We have to tell Riley. Everyone.”
“I know.”
“It’s going to be a war.”
“I know that, too.”
He lifted his head, looking up at her. “Are you scared?”
“Terrified.” She traced his eyebrow with her thumb. “But also not. Is that stupid?”
“Yes.” He leaned up and kissed her, softly this time. A sealing kiss. A promise kiss. It tasted like salt and determination. “But it’s the same stupid I feel.”
He helped her dress, his hands gentle on her clothes. When the nurse came in with a manila envelope, Ava took it. Inside were glossy printouts of the ultrasound. That definitive profile.
They walked out of the clinic into the ordinary afternoon. The world hadn’t ended. Cars passed. A kid laughed on the street. Normalcy pressed in, absurd and hostile.
Lucas stopped her beside his car, his hand on her arm. “Not the diner. Not for this.”
“Where then?”
“My place. Tonight. We’ll call Riley. We’ll ask her to come over.” He swallowed. “We’ll do it together.”
Ava looked down at the envelope in her hands, then back at him. She saw the fear in his eyes, but also a new, settled resolve. The boy who had pined for her sister was gone, burned away in the fever of the last few months. The man left in his place was hers. For better or worse.
“Okay,” she said, simple and final.
As he drove them away, she pulled one of the images from the envelope. In the shifting light of the passing streetlamps, the baby’s profile seemed to change, to look more like him, then more like her, then like something entirely its own. A secret, no longer just between the two of them, but between the three. It felt, for the first time, like the beginning of a family, even if the foundation was built on a fault line. She slid the picture back, her hand resting on the swell of her abdomen, feeling the echo of a galloping heartbeat beneath her palm.