“Everything looks perfect. And you’re having a girl.”
I made a sound I can’t describe. Something that came up from somewhere deep. I turned to Mark with tears already coming, already reaching for his face, and that’s when the door opened.
A nurse stepped in carrying a stack of folded cloth napkins. I barely registered her.
But Mark’s hand went limp in mine.
Not loosened. Not relaxed. Limp, the way a hand goes when something has knocked the awareness clean out of the body attached to it.
I turned to look at him.
His face was the color of old ash. His eyes weren’t on the screen, weren’t on me, weren’t on our daughter’s heartbeat still pulsing in the corner of the monitor.
They were locked onto the nurse.
And she, for just a fraction of a second, froze when she saw him.
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.
