Page 52

I listen. Gallop. Under the gallop – behind it, off the beat, a second –

"There are two heartbeats," Luke says.

The room goes still.

Behind me, my mother's pen stops with it. She has been taking minutes since the waiting room, and I hear the ballpoint touch down, lift, hover, and quietly give up. Whatever heading she had ready, it wasn't this one.

Mama Ortiz crosses herself. Once. No wasted motion.

Rosenthal leans toward the screen, unhurried, nudges the wand a centimetre, and beams like a man checking his own lottery numbers. "Well," he says. "Mazel tov. Twice."

On the screen: two flickers. Two separate, stubborn flickers, keeping their watery gallop a half-beat apart, like they're already arguing.

"Twins," Rosenthal confirms, calm as a weather forecast. "Both implanted beautifully. Strong cardiac activity on–"

"You said one." Luke is on his feet. When did he stand up? His voice has gone flat, which in him is a fire alarm. "One transfer, one baby. You stood in that office and said–"

"I said one transfer," Rosenthal says gently, "and one transfer is what I performed. Two graded embryos, excellent quality, both placed. Standard practice, Dr. Silva. It improves the odds, and it's on page six of the consent packet. And both of them, God bless, decided to stay. I never said one embryo." He spreads his hands, gold catching the ultrasound light. "The miracle is in the fine print."

"Page six," Luke repeats.

"Initialled," Rosenthal says. "Lower right corner."

Luke stands there a moment, turning that over.

Then he drops. A dead faint. Lucas Silva, trauma attending, the man who doesn't blink at the words rebar or degloving, felled in a fertility clinic.

Mama Ortiz is halfway out of her chair before he lands, thirty-four years of reflexes, then reads the fall on the way down, the whole diagnosis in one look, and sits back with her purse on her knees.

"Vasovagal," she says.

"Vasovagal," Rosenthal agrees, already crouching, two fingers at Luke's pulse, completely unfazed. "He's fine. Happens at least once a day in this room. For some reason the doctors go down the hardest." He pats Luke's cheek affectionately. "The fathers of twins especially. Frankly, I'm impressed he stayed up this long."

A hand appears at my shoulder, holding a slim silver flask. Monogrammed. Engraved. I read it twice to be sure: née Kensington.

"Kensingtons," my mother says, "always come prepared."

I take a long pull. It's vodka, and it's excellent.

Two. Two of everything. Two cribs, two car seats, two college funds, two teenagers, two proms, two people who will someday look at me the way I looked at my parents, and I have four hands' worth of things to carry and only two hands. I can't do the math because the math is the problem.

My mother looks past me at the screen, at the two flickers out of phase, and for exactly one second her face, the face that cost Uncle Frederick seventy-five per cent of everything he owned, does something undocumented.

"Two," she says, in a voice I have never heard her use for a number.

Then the second ends. The spine returns. The notebook opens. "I'll have to call the atelier," she says, writing. "Christening gowns are bespoke, Preston. There are lead times. No York has ever been on a waiting list, and they are not starting in utero."

On the floor, Luke's eyes open. He stares at the ceiling. He does not try to get up.

"Two," he tells the ceiling.

"Two," I confirm, and take another pull from my mother's flask.

Rosenthal beams down at him. "Welcome back, Dr. Silva. Wonderful news while you were out: still twins."

Mama Ortiz reaches into her bag and comes out not with food but with her knitting: two small blankets, one green, one yellow, both of them, I understand this now, the way you understand a prophecy at the exact moment it stops being useful, already months along.

"I started two," she tells the room, and takes up her needles.