Page 112 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

The doctor, who is still in the room and heard all of this in real time, looks up from her glove.

“Yes,” she says.

“Okay.” He sits back. “Good. Okay.”

I look at him. “Maddox, she’s a medical professional.”

“I know that.”

“Even if I had a male doctor⁠—”

“That’s not happening, Harper. Ever.”

The nurse, to her even greater credit, has turned to face the supply cabinet and her shoulders are shaking.

Asher pats my hand and I let Maddox’s little freak-out go.

The ultrasound takes less time than I expected and produces an image that looks, honestly, like television static to anyone without medical training.

Then the doctor points.

“There,” she says, tapping the screen with the tip of her pen. “That’s your baby.”

I stare at it.

It’s small. Impossibly, almost insultingly small, a little round shape barely distinguishable from the gray around it, a smudge on a screen, and I have no idea why my eyes are filling the way they are except that somehow, in the space of one second, that tiny dot has rearranged something in my chest that I don’t think is ever going back to where it was.

I didn’t expect this. I expected relief, maybe, or confirmation, the satisfaction of having the thing I already knew confirmed in clinical terms. I didn’t expect to feel it like this, all at once, like my whole body has just understood something my brain has been trying to catch up to for weeks.

I’ve never loved a dot on a screen so much in my entire life.

“Can we—” Maddox’s voice comes out rougher than usual, and he clears his throat once. “Can we get pictures? To take home?”

The doctor smiles, warm and practiced in a way that says she’s seen this moment a thousand times and it still gets her every single time. “Absolutely. I’ll take several so you all have plenty to choose from.”

The nurse is already moving to help, and I hear the soft click of the machine capturing the image, once, twice, three times, and somewhere in the middle of it a tear slides down my cheek that I didn’t give permission to leave.

Killian’s beside me before I even register him moving, one hand cupping the side of my face, his thumb catching the tear with a gentleness that doesn’t match his size or his suits or any version of him I knew before this summer.

“Harper.” His voice is low, just for me. “Hey. How are you feeling?”

I open my mouth to say fine, which is what I always say, and instead what comes out is a laugh that’s mostly air and mostly wet and doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever produced before.

“I didn’t know,” I manage. “I didn’t know I could love something that small. I didn’t know it was going to feel like this.”

His expression does something I’ve only seen it do a handful of times, something open and unguarded and completely uninterested in hiding itself, and he leans down and presses his mouth to mine, soft and slow and unhurried, the kind of kiss that has nothing to prove.

Asher’s lips find the back of my hand where he’s been holding it, warm and quiet.

Maddox presses a kiss to the top of my head, lingers there for a second, doesn’t say anything, which from him says everything.

I look back at the screen.

The little shape sits there completely unbothered, round and still and tiny, with no idea it’s already got four people completely undone by it.

I’m crying and grinning at the same time, which probably looks insane, and I genuinely cannot stop either one, my cheeks burning from the smile that won’t quit, my eyes too full to clear no matter how many times I blink.

“Hi,” I whisper, to the screen, to the little dot, to whoever’s in there getting comfortable. “Hi, baby.”