The simplicity of it landed somewhere under my ribs. I looked at him—at the particular focused steadiness of his expression, at the faint scar running from his cheek to his temple that I’d traced once in the dark without thinking about it, at the cold blue eyes that weren’t cold anymore, not when they were this close and this direct—and felt, as I felt with increasing frequency and decreasing resistance, the complicated thing that had been assembling itself in me across all the months since a man with cold eyes had saidI came to borrow Sofia from youin a room full of people and pulled me out of one life and toward something I hadn’t known to expect.
“I know,” I said. And I did know, which was still a new kind of knowledge, the still-surprising information that knowing was available to me. “I know that.”
He held my face a moment longer, then let go and picked up his keys. “Let’s go.”
The drive across the city was anticlimactic, gray sky threatening rain that hadn’t arrived yet, traffic thinner than usual. I watched the city move past the window and thought about the last time I’d sat in his car, looked out at this same skyline, and felt entirely alien to my own circumstances. The circumstances hadn’t simplified. Everything was still complicated, still marked by everything that had happened between us. The passenger seat of his car was familiar. The sound of his particular driving silence was familiar. The way he didn’t fill space with words when space didn’t require them was familiar in a way I’d stopped bracing against.
“Thanks for coming with me,” I said. It came out quieter than I intended.
He glanced at me. A brief cut of his eyes, quick and certain. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”
Five words, delivered in the same even tone he used for most things, and they landed with the weight of something he meant without ornamentation. I turned back to the window and let them settle.
The clinic was warm and clean and staffed by people whose professional calm I deeply appreciated. I’d been here once before, for the initial confirmation, and I’d been alone that time, and the sitting room had felt very large. Now Gregory was in the chair beside mine with his forearms on his knees and his eyes doing the patient inventory of the room that he performed in most new spaces, and the room felt proportionate.
We waited. He didn’t make conversation for the sake of it. I appreciated that too.
When they called my name, he stood when I stood, and we followed the nurse down a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and something floral, and I thought about all the times I’d walked corridors like this during rotations, the professional competence of someone on the other side of the clinical relationship, and how entirely different the same space felt from this side.
The sonographer was warm and efficient. “We’ll just take this step by step, all right?” she said, already reaching for the gel. She moved through the preliminary questions quickly, confirmed my dates with a soft, “That lines up,” and then I was on the table, Gregory standing at its edge, the machine doing its particular work.
“Cold,” she warned. Then, quieter, “You’re doing fine.”
The sound came first—the rapid, certain rush of a heartbeat. My breath caught before I could stop it. “That’s—” I started, but the words didn’t quite land, because then, before my brain fully processed what I was hearing, a second one came underneath it. Distinct. Separate. Its own rhythm.
I went still. “Wait,” I said, sharper this time. “There’s—”
Gregory’s hand tightened slightly where it hovered near mine. “Is that normal?” he asked, his voice controlled but thinner than usual, like something had slipped under the surface.
The sonographer smiled. I watched it happen in my peripheral vision, the particular smile of someone about to deliver information that would change the shape of someone’s day. “Let me show you,” she said gently.
I stared at the ceiling for a half-second and felt the room recalibrate. The air felt different. My chest felt too tight, too full, like something was expanding faster than I could adjust to it.
“Okay,” she said, turning the monitor toward us. “So this—” she pointed lightly, “—is one. And this is the second.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows, heart racing. “There are two,” I said, like saying it out loud might make it more real, or less.
Gregory let out a quiet breath beside me, something almost like a disbelieving laugh. “Two,” he repeated, softer.
“Congratulations,” the sonographer said, and her voice carried the warmth of someone who genuinely meant it. She angled the screen toward us properly now, giving us the full view. “You’re having twins. A boy and a girl.”
“A boy and a—” I stopped, the words catching somewhere between disbelief and something dangerously close to awe. I looked at Gregory, searching his face like I needed confirmation from him as much as from the machine. “Did she just say—?”
“She did,” he said, still looking at the screen, like he was committing it to memory. His hand found mine properly this time, fingers closing around it with quiet certainty. “A boy and a girl.”
I let out a breath that turned into something halfway between a laugh and a sob. “That feels excessive,” I said, because it was either that or start crying properly.
The sonographer laughed softly. “It can feel that way at first,” she said. “But they look good. Both of them.”
“Both of them,” I repeated, and this time it landed differently. Not shock. Not quite. Something steadier. Something that settled into place even as everything else shifted around it.
Gregory’s thumb moved once over my knuckles, slow and grounding. “We’re having twins,” he said, quieter now, like he was saying it for himself.
And I nodded, eyes still on the screen, on the two small, impossible proofs of something that had already changed everything. “We are,” I said.
I watched his shoulders move with a breath that was very slow and very controlled; his jaw, above his hands, was tight. His knuckles were white. The man who had stood in the basement of Maverick’s building with his gun raised and his face utterly still, who had fought Nico Calderon in our living room with the cold efficiency of someone for whom violence was a native language, was covering his face with both hands in a clinical room in Chicago because a sonographer had told him he was having twins, and he was not entirely in control of himself, and he wasn’t hiding it.
He eventually lowered his hands. His eyes, when he looked at me, were bright, something I’d never seen before, and I registered it as the specific thing it was—a man who didn’t cry and wasn’t going to, but whose eyes were doing the nearest available equivalent. He looked at me like I was the only fixed point in whatever the room had become.