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I shoved Holden off the bed. “I wasn’t worried about you.”
Forty minutes later, we were at the obstetrician’s office. Dr. Resnick did a quick exam and then a technician came in, rolling a machine with her. I was suddenly as nervous as I was excited. She set everything up, then pulled a condom over the wand and squirted lube on my belly.
Holden stood beside me, holding my hand so tightly. He looked as nervous as I felt.
The technician rolled the wand around, and a loud heartbeat echoed through the room. She fiddled with some knobs. “Strong heartbeat. Running a hundred and forty-eight beats per minute.”
Holden squeezed my hand. “Does everything look good?”
“I’m just going to take some measurements, and then I’ll give you an anatomy tour. But so far everything looks perfect.”
“Thank you for saying that,” I said. “Because I think I might be losing the circulation in my fingers.” I looked over at Holden, who took a minute to realize what I’d meant. When it clicked, he loosened his grip.
“Shit. Sorry.”
The ultrasound tech and I shared a smile.
She spent a few minutes scanning my belly and then pressed a little harder while pointing to the screen with her other hand.
“Eyes, nose, mouth. Little chin.”
I leaned forward, amazed at how clear it was. “Wow, it looks like a real person.”
She moved the wand again and a hand with five fingers came on the screen, clear as day. “I think he’s waving.”
“He?” Holden said. “It’s a boy?”
“No, sorry.” The tech shook her head. “That just came out. I actually don’t know to tell you if it’s a he or a she. We can’t usually see sex at the twelve-week exam.” She showed us the spine, knees, and feet. It was the coolest. I’d known I was pregnant, of course, but seeing a real human inside of me on the screen was mesmerizing.
Suddenly, the tech gasped and lifted the wand off my belly.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
She shook her head. “Oh my gosh. Nothing. I’m sorry again. I didn’t mean to scare you. I was scanning the reproductive organs. Like I said, normally I can’t tell the sex at twelve weeks. But I definitely can with this baby.”
My eyes bulged. “Really?”
The tech laughed. “I think this little peanut might go down in the books as the biggest gender-reveal show off I’ve ever seen. The legs are wide open, flaunting its sex organs.”
Holden and I looked at each other.
“This is definitely your child,” I said.
“Sex organ? Does that mean it’s a boy?”
“I said sex organs, not organ.” She looked between us. “But do you want to know?”
I said no at the exact same moment Holden said yes.
The woman smiled. “I can tell just one of you, if you’d like.”
I shook my head. “No way. Telling him would be like telling me. This baby’s father is the worst secret keeper in the world. Six weeks ago, we agreed we would tell a small, select group of a few friends and wait until the second trimester to tell anyone else. Every day I have strangers in the building we live in coming up and congratulating me.”
Holden shrugged. “What can I say? I’m happy. I want to tell the whole world you’re having my baby.”
I knew he meant that, which was why it was impossible to get mad at him for blabbing. The sonogram tech finished up her exam. She set the wand back in the holder and gave me a wad of paper towels to clean the lube off my belly. A row of pictures printed out from the machine, and the tech handed them to me.
“None of these show the sex. I’ll let you two talk for a few minutes. If you decide to find out, just tell the front desk to grab me.”
“Thank you.”
I looked down at the images as she finished packing up her machine. Glancing over each, I smiled. It was surreal to hold the first photos of our child. Each picture was a black square with a thin white border around it. On the bottom, there were tiny little letters and numbers typed within the white edges. I thought I could make out what they were, but I had to be wrong, had to be imagining what was there. So I pulled the strip of pictures to my nose for a closer inspection.
It can’t be.
The technician was halfway out the door already. “Wait!” I yelled.
She stopped.
I turned the sonogram images to face her and pointed to the bottom. “What are these letters down here? Is this your name?”
She leaned and squinted. “Oh, no. That’s the practice name. It’s abbreviated.”
I blinked a few times. “Really?”
“Yes, why?”
“I guess I just never saw it abbreviated like that. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Once she shut the door, I turned to Holden.
“You’re never going to believe this…”
“What?”
I held the photos out to him. “Look for yourself.”
