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I don’t make it out of the building before I run into Laney.

I’m still holding the ultrasound photo, still unsteady on my feet in the specific way you get after news that big, when I round a corner near the nurses’ station and nearly walk directly into a woman in scrubs reading a chart.

“Sorry, I —” I start, and then I actually look at her, and my whole chest goes cold.

“Margo?” Laney’s face shifts through several things at once — surprise, then recognition, then something sharper and more focused as she takes in my face properly. Whatever she sees there, it’s enough. She glances down at the photo in my hand, back up at my face, and something in her expression settles into a quiet, careful understanding.

“Oh, honey.” Her voice drops, warm and low, none of the surprise left in it now, just concern. “Come here. Come sit with me a minute.”

“I didn’t — I wasn’t trying to —” I fumble, the specific horror of being caught unprepared by exactly the one person whose read on this matters most. “I didn’t plan this. Running into you, I mean. I didn’t even know you worked in this wing.”

“I believe you.” She takes my elbow, gentle but certain, steering me down the hall. “I’ve got fifteen minutes before my next round. That’s enough time for tea, and you look like you could use some.”

The cafeteria is mostly empty at this hour, fluorescent-lit and smelling like reheated coffee, and Laney gets us both tea from a machine that groans through the process like it’s personally offended by the request. She sits across from me at a table by the window, and for a moment she doesn’t say anything at all, just lets me have the silence while I try to figure out how to start.

“You already know,” I say, finally. “Don’t you.”

“I’ve delivered enough babies and held enough hands in this building to recognize the specific look on your face.” She says it gently, no judgment in it. “You don’t have to tell me anything you’re not ready to tell me. But I don’t think you ran into me by accident, not really. I think some part of you needed to say it to somebody, and I happened to be standing here.”

I look down at the ultrasound photo, still gripped in my hand. “It’s Theo’s.”

“I assumed.” A small, careful smile. “How far along?”

“Six weeks when I found out. It’s been six weeks since then too. I haven’t told him yet.” My voice cracks on the last part. “I’m going to. Today. I was already planning to before I even ran into you.”

“Okay.” Laney wraps both hands around her tea, watching me with the same full, unhurried attention she gave me over coffee at her kitchen table weeks ago. “That’s a lot to be carrying alone.”

“It’s twins,” I say. The word comes out small. “I just found out. I don’t even know how to feel about it yet, on top of everything else.”

Something moves across Laney’s face — surprise, warmth, the specific complicated joy of a grandmother-to-be getting news she wasn’t remotely expecting in a hospital cafeteria. “Twins,” she repeats, quiet, like she’s testing the shape of the word. “Well. That explains why you look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”

I laugh, wet and involuntary, the first laugh I’ve managed all day.

“I’m scared,” I admit. “I’m so scared, Laney. Not of the babies. I want them, I know that already, I’ve known it since I saw the screen. I’m scared of what it does to him. To his season. The draft. Everything he’s spent his whole life building toward, and I’m about to walk into his room and hand him something that could knock all of it sideways at the worst possible moment.”

“You think that’s your decision to make. Whether he can handle it.”

The observation lands with more weight than its gentle delivery suggests. “I don’t want to trap him,” I say. “I mean that completely. If this isn’t something he can see himself taking on — not because he doesn’t love me, but because of the timing, because of everything riding on this exact stretch of his life — I need him to know he doesn’t have to. I’ll do this alone if I have to. I’d rather do it alone than watch him resent me for taking his choice away.”

Laney is quiet for a moment, turning her tea cup slowly in her hands.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she says, “and I need you to actually hear it, not just be polite and nod at it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“His father was around, technically, until Theo was fifteen. I want to be fair about that.” Laney’s voice stays even, but there’s something harder underneath it now. “But ‘around’ isn’t the same as there. Lucas had his business trips, his excuses, whole stretches of weeks where he’d disappear and come back like nothing happened, and I raised that boy in every way that actually counted — alone, in three rooms with a stuck window and never enough money, filling in every gap his father left behind and calling it normal because I didn’t know yet that it wasn’t.” Her voice is steady, but there’s real feeling underneath it, the specific weight of a woman who’s earned the right to say what she’s about to say. “Then Theo found out at fifteen what those trips actually were. A second family. A whole other life Lucas had been living in the gaps. And after that, ‘around’ stopped even being true. I know exactly what it looks like when a person decides they don’t want the responsibility. I watched it happen up close for fifteen years before it finally became honest about itself. And I am telling you, as his mother, as someone who has watched that boy build himself into a man with almost nothing to work with — that is not who he is. That was never going to be who he is.”

“You don’t know that this is the same as —”

“I know my son.” She says it without heat, the specific certainty of someone who has never once doubted this particular fact. “I watched him look at you the day you came to Dorchester. I’ve been a nurse for twenty-two years, honey. I know what love looks like on a person’s face before they’ve said a single word about it. He looked at you like you were the only thing in that room worth looking at. That’s not a boy who runs from hard things. That’s a boy who’s spent his whole life wishing somebody had stayed for him, and I promise you, he is going to stay for you and for those babies, because staying is the thing he’s wanted his entire life and never had modeled for him properly until he had the chance to build it himself.”

I don’t say anything. I can’t. My eyes are burning and my hands are shaking around the paper cup.

“It will be okay,” Laney says. Quiet. Certain. “Not easy. I’m not going to promise you easy — nothing about this is going to be easy, and I’d be lying to you if I said otherwise. But okay. I raised a good man. He is going to make the right decision, and the right decision is you. Trust him to make that choice. Don’t make it for him by deciding you already know what he’ll pick.”

I think about the last thing she said — don’t make it for him — and feel the specific, uncomfortable click of recognition, the same shape of the exact thing I’ve been doing for six weeks without letting myself name it.

“I’ve been doing that,” I admit. “Making decisions for him. That’s — that’s actually the whole problem, isn’t it.”