Page 134

Three weeks later

We hear the heartbeats the morning of the biggest game of my life.

Dr. Ambrose’s office is quiet in the specific early way of a place that hasn’t fully woken up yet, sun still low through the blinds, the waiting room empty except for us. Margo’s hand is tight in mine, her leg bouncing with the specific nervous energy she gets before anything that matters, and I sit there trying to hold still for both of us, though my own pulse is doing something I don’t have a name for.

“You okay?” she asks, glancing over.

“Yeah.” I squeeze her hand. “You?”

“Nervous. Good nervous.” She smiles, small and real. “You get to hear them today. That’s a big deal.”

It hadn’t fully registered until she said it out loud, standing in this waiting room. Today’s the day I stop imagining them as an abstraction — twins, strawberries, two flickers on a screen I only ever heard about secondhand — and start hearing them as something real.

Frozen Four’s tonight. TD Garden, twenty minutes from here, the whole reason we’re even in Boston today instead of Haven. I asked Coach for the morning off weeks ago, back when this appointment first got scheduled, and he didn’t ask a single question, just told me to be at the rink by two and not a minute later. I think he already knew why I needed it. I think he’s the kind of man who understands exactly what matters more than a shootaround.

Dr. Ambrose calls us back at nine-fifteen.

She’s exactly like Margo described — calm, unhurried, the specific kind of competence that makes you trust someone within the first minute of meeting them. She shakes my hand like it’s not the first time she’s meeting the father of a patient’s twins in slightly unusual circumstances, no judgment in it at all.

“Theo,” she says. “Good to finally put a face to the name. Margo talks about you.”

“Good things, I hope.”

“Mostly.” Her eyes crinkle. “Let’s get you two in to see them.”

Margo lies back on the exam table, shirt pushed up, the small curve of her stomach visible now in a way it wasn’t the last time I saw her like this — not dramatic, but there, undeniable, the specific proof of something I still haven’t fully caught up to believing. Dr. Ambrose squeezes gel onto her stomach, cold enough that Margo hisses through her teeth, and presses the wand down, watching the screen with the practiced patience of someone who’s done this a thousand times and still pays full attention every single time.

“There’s baby A,” she says, after a moment, turning the screen toward us. “And baby B, right beside. Both measuring right on track.”

I stare at the screen. Two shapes, bigger now than the strawberries I talked to weeks ago, something closer to actual babies now, actual limbs, actual heads. My chest does something complicated and enormous, something I don’t have language for yet.

“Do you want to hear them,” Dr. Ambrose asks.

I can’t speak for a second. I just nod.

She adjusts something on the machine, and the room fills with sound — fast, steady, a rhythm too quick to be an adult heartbeat, whooshing and insistent and completely, undeniably alive. Then a second one, layered under the first, slightly different in tempo, its own separate rhythm entirely.

Two heartbeats. My kids’ heartbeats.

I feel my eyes burn before I can stop them. I don’t try to stop them.

“Theo.” Margo’s hand finds mine, squeezing hard. “Hey. Look at me.”

I look at her instead of the screen, and she’s crying too, both of us just sitting there letting the sound fill the room, and I understand, hearing it, exactly what I’m playing for tonight in a way I didn’t fully understand walking in here.

“They’re both strong,” Dr. Ambrose says, gentle, giving us the moment instead of rushing past it. “Good, steady rhythm on both. Everything looks exactly the way it should.”

“Thank you,” I manage. My voice comes out wrecked.

“You don’t have to thank me. This is the good part of my job.” She wipes the gel off, helps Margo sit up. “You’ve got a big game tonight, I hear.”

“I do.”

“Good luck. Something tells me you’re going to play like you mean it.”

I think about Richard’s card, the same words he sent to the team hotel weeks ago, and something in my chest settles even further into place.

We sit in the car outside the office for a while before either of us starts the engine.