Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 306

Chapter 298. A Girl.

SEDONA

The appointment was at ten on a Wednesday. And by nine-fifty, we were waiting in the waiting room of the imaging clinic. I was accompanied by Dante and my mother.

She had offered to wait in the car. This had lasted approximately eight minutes before she appeared in the waiting room with two cups of tea she’d produced from somewhere and the expression of a woman who had decided the car was too far away for something this important.

“I’ll stay in the waiting room, settling into a chair with her tea. I just want to be close.”

Dante looked at me.

“I’ve learned that certain things are simply true.”

The sonographer was a calm, efficient woman. She’d clearly spent years conducting appointments for families ranging from nervously quiet to loudly enthusiastic, and had developed the specific professional warmth that worked for both.

Dante held my hand throughout. Not anxiously, just present, the way he was always present, full attention, no part of his focus elsewhere.

The image came up on the screen, the specific blurry, flickering clarity of a scan that I’d been told to expect but that still landed differently than I’d anticipated, real, unmistakably real, a small person going about their business with total indifference to the significance the people in the room were attaching to this particular Wednesday.

“Everything looks excellent,” the sonographer said, moving the probe, measuring, confirming. “Development exactly where we’d expect it. Strong heartbeat, do you hear that?”

We heard it.

Dante’s hand tightened slightly on mine, just for a second.

“Now,” the sonographer said, “did you want to know the sex, if we can confirm it today?”

“Yes,” we said at the same time.

She moved the probe, looking, taking her time about it with the practiced patience of someone who had delivered this news thousands of times and still gave each one the proper space.

“There we go,” she said. “I can confirm for you, you’re having a girl.”

The room went very quiet for a moment.

Dante looked at the screen. Then at me. His face did the thing it had done when I’d shown him the test, that particular open, underneath quality, the careful outer layer simply not present.

“A girl,” he said.

“A girl,” I confirmed, though neither of us technically needed the confirmation at this point.

My mother, in the waiting room, knew before we’d fully sat back down.

She read it in my face through the glass door before it had even opened, the specific maternal frequency she’d operated on my entire life.

“A girl,” she said. Not a question.

“A girl,” I said.

The sound she made was somewhere between a gasp and something that didn’t have a name, and she pressed both hands to her face, the same gesture she’d made at the competition when Nick had waved with both arms, and I thought that some feelings simply demanded the same response regardless of how different the circumstances were.

“A girl,” she said again, slightly muffled behind her hands. “The first girl. Sedona, the first girl in…” She stopped. “I need to call your father.”

“You can call him from the car.

“I’m calling him right now. Already dialling. Already moving toward the window with the urgency of someone transmitting essential intelligence.

We told the family that evening.

Nick and Drew were at the kitchen table when we sat everyone down, the specific gathered-family arrangement that by now signalled to everyone present that something worth stopping for was being said.

“We found out today at the scan,” I said. “We’re having a girl.”

Nick’s reaction arrived in two stages.

The first was a long, slow blink, processing.

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