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 flashlight when we should have been sleeping.
The door clicked behind Dr. Akhtar, and Nick helped me off the bench and wrapped his arms around me. His tears fell in my hair.
“Are they good tears?” I whispered. “Are you good?”
Nick pulled away, beaming. “I am so good,” he said. “I wish I’d had more faith in myself. The minute I saw them on the screen, all cuddled up, I couldn’t imagine how I ever thought…” His voice thickened. “We did it. We’re going to be parents. We are,” he said pointedly.
Relief flooded me. “We’re going to be really awesome parents,” I said.
We stared at each other for a moment, dumbstruck smiles on our faces, then simultaneously reached out and knocked on the faux wood panel on the exam table. Then we both giggled.
“Superstition,” Nick said. “I can’t help it.”
“I know. But I love you,” I said. “I love them. Let’s be hopeful this time. And I really need to put my pants back on, because my butt is getting cold.”
Nick laughed. “We’d better make a note to give Freddie a spectacular wedding gift. A silver chafing dish is not going to cut it.”
“Would he like a house in Sweden, do you think?” I wondered, doing up my pants very carefully over my stomach, as if the babies (the babies!) might be disturbed by an overly aggressive zip. “I guess he’s going to end up with a lot of houses, though.”
“We can percolate that,” Nick said. “But there is one fairly serious thing we do need to do first, and right now.” He held open his arms. “Rebecca Porter, may I, at very long last, have this twirl?”
I felt my face crumple in on itself, but this time—maybe for the first time—it was with joy. Tears streamed down my cheeks as Nick tenderly picked me up and spun me once, twice, three times, before setting me back gracefully on my feet.
“There,” he said, taking my face in his hands and kissing me, before smoothing away my tears with his thumbs. “Now it’s official. We’re having a baby. Two babies.”
“Two down, three to go,” I joked.
Nick laughed. “I knew you’d come around,” he said, then tugged at my ponytail. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take the three of you home.”
* * *
The reaction to Freddie’s betrothal was—predictably—gigantic. Bloggers were instantly obsessed with Daphne; a new fashion site had already been started called Daphne’s Diary, and the teal dress she wore for their engagement photo shoot sold out in six and a half minutes. It wasn’t surprising that everyone had caught, as Vanity Fair had put it, “Tulip Fever”: On paper, Freddie and Daphne were the platonic ideal of a sweeping love story, the wayward prince and the
