He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 223

Chapter 223

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Chapter 223

Maya’s POV

The car was waiting at six-thirty…. I had learned, across the past several days, not to ask where we were going before we got there… not because Alex refused to tell me but because the arriving was better than the knowing in advance, and I had allowed myself to trust that.

The Paris streets at this hour.

I pressed my face to the window… “You’re not going to tell me where we’re going,” I said.

“No,” he said.

“You could just tell me.”

“I could,” he said. “Trust me.”

I looked at him.

At the smile…. the excited version, the one that had been present since the hot-air balloon morning and that had not dimmed across the week, if anything had brightened with each successive day as the momentum of the surprises carried their own energy forward.

“All right,” I said.

The clinic…

I looked at Alex.

“I thought this was a vacation,” I said

“It is,” he said. “But there’s someone I want to meet.”

I looked at the clinic sign.

At him.

“The babies,” I said.

“The baby,” he said. “I want to see the baby.” He held the door. “Properly. I’ve been hearing about this pregnancy for weeks, from inside a coma, and I’ve seen the ultrasound photograph and I want the actual experience. Sitting in the actual room with the actual equipment and hearing the actual….”

“You want to hear the heartbeat,” I said.

“More than almost anything else we’ve done this week,” he said.

The doctor welcomed us with professional warmth….. The examination room was the kind that had clearly been designed with someone’s experience in mind. Not the standard white and fluorescent…. warmer, the consideration of a space that understood that the people in it were not patients in the emergency sense but people in the middle of something important.

Alex did not let go of my hand.

Not from anxiety…. I watched the screen.

Alex watched the screen.

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The doctor watched the screen.

The sound.

The heartbeat…. the rapid, unmistakeable sound that existed in a register no other sound occupied. Present, insistent, entirely itself.

Alex’s hand tightened on mine.

Not painfully.

He looked at me. I looked at the screen.

The doctor was quiet for a moment. Then her smile changed.

Not the polite smile of a professional conducting a routine examination. The other kind, the one that appeared when something had been found that the finder understood would be significant to the people waiting for the

news.

“I have wonderful news,” she said. I looked up immediately.

“Is the baby all right?” I said.

“The babies,” she said, “are perfect.”

I heard the word.

The plural of it.

Processed it.

Said nothing for what was probably two or three seconds.

“The babies?” I said.

She nodded

“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re having twins.”

Alex made a sound.

Not a word…. the sound that existed before words when information arrived that was too large for immediate language. A kind of involuntary exhalation. The sound of someone who had forgotten for a moment how to breathe.

“A boy,” the doctor said, “and a girl.”

I looked at the screen.

At the two…. the two….. shapes on it, which now that she had named them resolved into their separate existence rather than the single image I had been reading for months.

Two.

Two heartbeats.

I had been hearing one heartbeat, thinking about one heartbeat, telling Alex about one heartbeat from inside a hospital room for two months…. and there had been two heartbeats the whole time, present in the same space, and neither of us had known.

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The tears arrived before I decided to let them.

Two.

Alex laughed.

“We’re having two?” he said.

“You are,” the doctor said.

He looked at me.

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At my face, which was doing several things simultaneously…. the tears, and underneath the tears something that was building toward the same laughter he was already in, the two states competing for the same facial space.

He leaned down.

Kissed my forehead…..

Placed his hand over mine on the examination table.

“I thought one miracle was enough,” he said. Against my temple…. “God decided to give us two.”

Outside the clinic.

We stood on the pavement.

Alex looked at me.

I looked at him.

Neither of us had fully assembled the language for what had just happened…., not because it was bad language, but because the language for twins in the context of everything that had preceded this moment was still forming, still finding its shape.

He picked me up

Not dramatically…. carefully.

“Alex…..”

“I know,” he said, already setting me back down with the same care he had used to lift me. “I know. I’m sorry. I just….”

He looked at me.

At my face.

At the expression on my face, which was the one I had been producing increasingly over the past week, which was the one that arrived when something was genuinely more than I had been prepared for and I had decided to let it be more.

He smiled

The mischievous version.

“Now I need an even bigger surprise,” he said.

I looked at him.

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“Alex,” I said.

“Twins,” he said.

“Twins,” I confirmed.

“I have to think bigger,” he said

“You do not have to think bigger,” I said.

“A boy and a girl,” he said.

“Yes,” I said

“We need to tell everyone,” he said.

“We do need to tell everyone,” I said.

He was already reaching for his phone.

I put my hand over his.

He looked at me.

“Can we have five minutes?” I said.

He looked at me.

At my face

Understood.

He put the phone away.

Stood beside me on the Paris pavement.

The two of us.

Soon to be four.

The morning happening around us.

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