Then she looked away and set the napkins down and left the room, and Mark stood up so abruptly his chair scraped hard across the floor.
“I need air,” he muttered, and he was already moving toward the door, already gone before I could say his name.
The doctor looked at me with the careful, neutral expression of a person who has seen things in this room and learned not to comment on them.
I looked back at the screen, at my daughter’s profile, and the perfect curve of her nose.
I told myself it was nerves. That some men go strange at ultrasounds, that it’s a lot to process, that I was reading into things because eight years of trying had turned me into someone who scanned every situation for what might go wrong.
I told myself a lot of things on the drive home.
