Chapter 23: Fourteen Weeks

Odile's text sat on my phone all Friday morning: Saturday, two o'clock, the boathouse. I will tell the child everything myself.

I had read it until the words stopped being words.

Sam said she could send her invitations to my lawyer, and then he said we would go anyway, together.

On Friday afternoon the colleague who had taken over my care ran the probe over my stomach while Sam stood against the wall.

He had been told to keep his hands in his pockets.

He kept them there for almost a full minute.

"Fourteen weeks and one day," the colleague said.

She was a brisk woman with reading glasses on a cord.

"Everything is where it should be. Would you like the sound?"

"Yes," I said.

She turned a dial.

The room filled with a fast, bright, wet galloping.

I had heard it before, on Sam's screen at midnight.

I had never heard it with my whole body listening.

"One fifty-four," she said. "Beautiful."

I turned my head.

Sam had come off the wall without noticing.

He was standing right beside the table with his eyes on the screen.

His hand hung an inch above my arm, not touching.

I took it, and I pulled it down onto my shoulder.

The colleague looked at the two of us over her glasses, and said, "I'll go and print this," and left very quickly.

"She's not wrong to leave," I said.

"No."

"Sam."

"Yes."

"Take me home."

He did not ask whose.

We went up the stairs of the brick building.

He locked the apartment door behind us and leaned against it, looking at me.

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