Around her.
I felt it in the exact moment her hand went still in mine—not tightening, not pulling away, just stopping, like something inside her had reached the edge of what it could process and held there. Her breathing followed a second later, not uneven, not panicked, just… absent. Like her body had forgotten the next step and hadn’t decided yet whether to take it.
“There we go,” the doctor offered, her voice calm, practiced, a steady thread meant to guide the moment without intruding on it.
The image sharpened.
Bea didn’t speak.
She didn’t move.
She didn’t look at me.
And I didn’t look at the screen. I watched her instead.
I watched the exact point where something shifted beneath the surface—where this stopped being something shecould hold at a distance, stopped being something she could organize, prepare for, or contain inside a framework that made it manageable.
It wasn’t abstract anymore.
It wasn’t theoretical.
It wasn’t something coming later.
It was here.
Now.
Ours.
Her grip tightened then—sudden, sharp, enough that I felt the force of it all the way through my hand and up my arm, grounding me in my own body in a way I would have reacted to before, would have adjusted for, would have tried to ease.
I didn’t.
I let her hold on exactly as hard as she needed to.
“Everything looks good,” the doctor continued, her tone steady, measured, the kind of reassurance that carried weight because it didn’t try to oversell it. “Strong. Exactly where we want to be.”
Bea let out a breath, but it didn’t come clean.
It broke on the way out, catching somewhere deeper than the last few seconds, like it had been sitting there longer, waiting—not for the words, not for the confirmation, but for permission to exist.
Her head turned slowly toward me.
Her eyes were bright, but not fragile.
Unprotected in a way she had never allowed before, not even when she was unraveling, not even when she was fighting to hold everything together.
She wasn’t looking for answers.
She wasn’t looking for control.
She was looking for something steadier than both.
I leaned in without thinking, closing the distance until myforehead brushed hers, grounding us back into something smaller than the room, smaller than the weight of what had just settled between us—something we could hold without it slipping through our hands.
“On est bien,” I murmured quietly.We’re okay.
Her lips parted, her breath catching again, but this time it didn’t fracture.