Chapter 4: The Scan
The gel was cold. It always was, I'd stood on this side of a thousand ultrasounds, reassuring parents while the wand pressed and slid. I'd never thought about what the gel felt like from the table. Cold and thick, spreading across my skin like something that didn't belong there.
The radiographer was a small woman with grey hair and steady hands. She'd introduced herself as Denise and then gone quiet, her eyes fixed on the screen to my right. I couldn't see it from where I lay. I could only see her face, and the small furrow between her brows.
Kate sat in the plastic chair beside me, gripping my hand too tightly. We'd come together, her idea, her insistence that I couldn't keep putting it off. "You need to know how far along you are," she'd said over tea that morning. "You need to know what you're dealing with."
I'd agreed because she was right. I'd agreed because I was tired of the unknown, the constant low hum of uncertainty that followed me through every shift.
"Okay," Denise said, her voice soft, almost to herself. The wand pressed lower on my belly, angled differently. The room hummed around the ultrasound's steady pulse.
"Everything alright?" I asked.
"Just a moment."
The wand moved again. Then stopped. Denise’s face did something careful, the kind of stillness I'd seen in my own colleagues when they'd spotted something they weren't sure how to name.
Kate's grip tightened. "What is it?"
The radiographer leaned forward, adjusting a dial on the machine. The screen flickered, recalibrated. And then I heard it, the sound I'd been bracing for, the fast, rhythmic gallop of a heartbeat. Small and steady.
"That's good," I breathed.
Denise didn't answer. Her hand steadied on the wand, and in the silence I heard it. A second rhythm. Fainter, but there, overlapping the first in a way that made no sense.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Just a moment, please."
Kate's eyes met mine. I could see the same question in them, the one neither of us dared to voice.
Denise moved the wand again, gentle, methodical. Then she looked at the screen and her face relaxed, the professional mask dropping into something softer, almost surprised.
"There are two heartbeats," she said.
The room tilted. I heard the words, I must have, but they seemed to arrive late, travelling through water.
"Two?" Kate's voice cracked.
"Yes." Denise smiled, the first real smile since she'd entered. She turned the screen toward me. "Twins. Identical, by the look of it. See?"
I couldn't see. I could only see two small crescents on the dark screen, pulsing like matching stars, each one a flicker of life I hadn't known was there.
Two.
Not one. Not a single secret I'd been carrying, a single life I'd been protecting. Two of them. Two small heartbeats, synced or nearly, sharing the same space that had been, until twelve weeks ago, just mine.
"I'm having twins," I said out loud, because saying it might make it real.
"You're having twins," Denise confirmed. "Just over twelve weeks. Both measuring well. Everything looks good."
Kate let out a breath beside me, something between a laugh and a sob. "Jill."
I couldn't look at her. My eyes stayed fixed on the screen, on those two small crescents of light. Every fear I'd carried, every weight I'd shouldered alone, had just doubled.
"We need to hear the second heartbeat again," Kate was saying to Denise. "Can you, she wants to hear it again."
But I was somewhere else. I was in a Camden flat with water stains on the ceiling and a shoebox with a single onesie inside. I'd bought one. I'd prepared for one. One name, one child, one secret, one weight to carry.
And now there were two.
Denise pressed a button and the sound filled the room again. Two overlapping rhythms, close but not identical, a double gallop like the second hand of a clock that couldn't quite agree with itself.
"It's them," I said, my voice strange to my own ears.
Kate's hand was on my arm now, steady and warm. "It's them," she echoed. "Both of them."
The screen held the two crescents, pulsing in the dark. And somewhere behind them, in the space between heartbeats, I thought of him. His grey eyes. His careful hands. The way he'd said goodbye with such unbearable calm.
He didn't know about one. He would never know about two.
I would raise them alone. I'd carry them alone. I'd love them alone, these two small lives made in a night that was meant to be a beginning and had become an ending.
"You're okay," Kate said softly. "You're going to be okay."
I nodded, still unable to look away from the screen. The two crescents pulsed, patient and indisputable, asking for nothing but already changing everything.
"How do I tell them about their father?" I asked, and Denise looked up in surprise.
It had been a question for Kate, and Kate understood. She waited until I finally turned my head to meet her eyes.
"You tell them the truth," she said. "When they're old enough. And until then, you tell them they are loved."
The wand lifted. The gel was wiped away with a paper towel that came away cold and grey. Denise printed a photo, two dark shapes on a black field. I took it with trembling hands and stared at my children.
Two heartbeats. Two secrets. Two small lives that had just made my world both larger and more terrifying.
I put the photo in my pocket, over my heart, and let Kate help me sit up.
Denise printed a second copy and slid both into a small brown envelope. "You'll want these for the folder. And you'll be booked for a growth scan at sixteen weeks to confirm, but everything looks excellent. Both are measuring right on schedule."
I took the envelope. The paper was warm from the machine.
Kate helped me swing my legs off the table. The paper towel crinkled under me, and the room smelled of disinfectant and warm plastic. I stood, and for a moment the floor tilted, and her hand was at my elbow, steady.
"Take your time," Denise said, already typing notes into the computer. "You can sit in the waiting room as long as you need. The midwife will want a word before you go."
We walked out into the corridor. The door clicked shut behind us, sealing the two crescents into the dark of the room we'd left. The waiting room was pale green, fluorescent-lit, a row of plastic chairs with a woman three seats down rubbing her round belly and looking at her phone.
Kate steered me to the far corner. I sat, the envelope clutched in both hands.
"You need a minute?" she asked.
"I need to understand what just happened."
"You're having twins."
"I know." I laughed, and it came out wet. "I keep saying it and it keeps being true."
She sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. The woman with the belly glanced over, then looked away. None of her business. None of anyone's business.
I opened the envelope and pulled out the photos. Two small crescents on black, the same image twice, printed in grainy grey. I'd held a thousand of these. I'd handed them to parents with a smile and a congratulations, never once understanding what they meant.
"Two," I said softly. "The onesie. I bought one."
"You'll buy another."
"The flat. The bed's a single."
"You'll make it work. People do."
I looked at her. "Kate, I'm a nurse. My salary covers the studio and the bills and not much else. I'd planned for one cot, one buggy, one of everything. I can't afford two of everything."
She was quiet a moment. Then she said, "You're not doing this alone. I'm here. And there's help out there. Child benefit, working tax credit, the nursery attached to the hospital has a staff discount."
"I don't want charity."
"It's not charity, it's what the system is for." She reached over and folded my fingers closed over the photos. "You've spent every day of the last month telling yourself you're carrying one secret. Now you're carrying two. That changes things."
"How?"
"Because you can't carry them alone. Not literally." She nodded at my stomach. "Two is heavier than one. Two needs more hands."
I thought of the studio in Camden. The narrow mattress on the floor. The shoebox with the single onesie. I'd built my whole plan around one child, one secret, one weight. Now I was doubling the weight of everything.
"What are you going to do about work?" Kate asked.
"They'll notice soon. I'm already twelve weeks. With twins, I'll show faster. I'll be into the rigid maternity dresses by twenty."
"You'll need to tell the Charge Nurse."
"I know."
"Before someone guesses." She paused. "Before someone mentions it to him."
I hadn't thought of that. He moved in certain circles. Great Ormond Street had governors, benefactors, people who knew people. If I started showing, if word got around, if someone at a dinner party mentioned that a nurse in the PICU was expecting twins and the father wasn't in the picture...
He'd hear. Not from town gossip about him, but about me. And he'd count the months.
The paediatric specialist nurse who'd been my girlfriend. The timing would be obvious.
"If he finds out," I said slowly, "if he finds out before I tell him, he'll come looking for me. And he'll want to know why I didn't say anything. And he'll make it his business to be involved, because that's what he does. He takes charge of things."
Kate watched me. "You've been so set on keeping him out."
"I have been. I still am. But I've been assuming he'd never know. Now I have to assume he will."
The woman three seats down stood and waddled toward the door to the scan room. The corridor fell quiet.
"What will you do?" Kate asked.
I looked at the photos in my hand. Two crescents. Two heartbeats. I'd spent a month building walls to keep one secret safe. Now I had to build walls high enough for two.
"I'll tell the matron on Monday," I said. "And I'll start looking for a place with two rooms. And I'll save every penny I can." I put the photos back in the envelope. "And if he finds out, he finds out. I'll deal with it then."
Kate squeezed my arm. "That's a plan."
"It's a start."
I stood, and the envelope went into my pocket, over my heart. The waiting room light buzzed. Somewhere through the wall, the ultrasound machine hummed, printing another picture for another parent, another secret, another life.
I was carrying two now. And for the first time since the morning he'd said goodbye, I realised I was carrying something that could not be undone, not by his leaving, not by my silence, not by anything I did or failed to do.
Two heartbeats. They were already a fact. And facts, Kate had said, are easier to carry when someone else knows them too.