“Is that what I think it is?” Daniel asked. His voice was suddenly thin, the polished edge completely gone.
“The pregnancy is roughly twelve weeks along,” Dr. Morris said, her voice even and clinical. “The gestational sac is intact, and the fetal heart rate is strong at one hundred and fifty beats per minute.”
I looked at the tiny shape on the screen, my hand rising to my stomach before I could stop myself. Twelve weeks meant the early summer, before the heat had set in, before the argument by the back wall.
“And the development looks normal?” Daniel asked, his body leaning so far forward his chest almost touched the edge of the desk.
“Extremely normal,” Dr. Morris said. She tapped a key, zooming in on the small pelvic structure. “In fact, the early anatomical markers are quite clear.”
She paused, looking directly at Daniel over the top of her reading glasses.
You are having a boy,” she said.
Daniel did not move for several seconds, his eyes fixed on the grey-and-white pixels. His index finger, which had been poised to tap his gold watch face, froze against the metal casing.
A slow, deep breath went in through his nose, his shoulders dropping three inches as the air left his chest. His knees, locked tight since we arrived at the hospital, visibly softened.
“A boy,” he whispered.
He turned to look at me, and for a single second, his face carried the expression of a man who had just inherited an empire. The coldness behind his eyes was replaced by a sharp, calculating hunger.
“Elena,” he said, reaching across the small gap between our chairs to grasp my fingers. “Did you hear that? A boy.”
His fingers were warm now, no longer the cold iron of the parking lot, but the pressure was just as firm. He looked back at the monitor, his chest swelling beneath his pressed blue shirt.
“We need to make sure she has the best prenatal care immediately,” Daniel said to the doctor, his professional delivery returning with double the force. “Whatever the cost, whatever specialists we need to bring in.”
“The pregnancy is not the only thing we documented, sir,” Dr. Morris said.
She clicked the mouse again, and the screen split into two smaller windows. The image of our son shrunk to the left side, while a black-and-white skeletal image filled the right.
