I hesitate before saying it out loud. “Do you think something might be wrong with me?”
He answers immediately. “No, Charlotte.”
“But don’t you think it’s strange? Five years of not being exact and nothing’s ever happened.”
“Maybe something’s wrong with me.”
That catches me off guard.
“It takes two people to make a baby,” he says. “It’s not all on you.”
“But for you there’s nothing that would suggest?—”
“Same for you.” He leans forward, resting his forearms against the table. “Your cycles are regular. They always have been. Nothing’s ever seemed off.”
“That doesn’t mean everything’s working the way it should. It just means nothing obvious is wrong.”
“That’s true, but it’s also all we have to go on. And everything we’ve seen points to normal.”
This isn’t really about tracking or whether we’ve been accurate.
It’s something deeper than that.
“I obviously don’t want to have a baby here. That would be reckless. But back in Australia…” I pause, trying to put the feeling into words. “I think I would want one someday.”
I hold his gaze across the chessboard.
“Would you want to be a father?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah. One day. Under different circumstances.”
His answer settles heavily somewhere deep inside me. Not just the words themselves, but everything attached to them.
“We could never have children together.”
The words leave my mouth quietly, but the second they’re spoken, something changes between us. The mood shifts and doesn’t settle back the same way again.
Dane goes completely still.
We could never have children together.
I hear the words again in my own head, only now they feel different because they’ve been said out loud. Real in a way they weren’t before.
Out there, we are what we are on paper. In records. In every version of the world that decides what people are allowed to be to each other.
Brother and sister.
And beyond that is the part neither of us has ever really touched directly before—the finality of it. The understanding that some doors were never open to us in the first place.
A painful tightness builds in my chest.
Because I want it. Not now. Not here on this island. But someday.
I want to be a mother.
The realization settles into me fully formed, impossible to push away now that it’s here. I want to carry a child. I want that closeness. That feeling of something becoming part of you before the rest of the world even knows it exists.
I think about Mum keeping that ultrasound tucked away, carrying it with her while she waited for the right moment to share it. And suddenly I understand it differently than I ever could before.
