Page 222 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

‘It felt like you cared.’

His voice was deep and measured and she knew exactly what he was remembering. The sex they’d shared. The sex that had resulted in this little one residing deep inside of her.

Her name being called saved her from answering. She sprang to her feet and approached the sonographer. Dom did likewise.

‘No,’ she said, except the sonographer got in first.

‘Ah, is this your partner? Lovely,’ she said, and Mari got the sense she was remarking about Dom’s looks rather than the proud father-to-be he presented himself as. ‘Come on through.’

She directed Dom to a visitor chair while she got Mari to lie on the bed. ‘So, not your first pregnancy?’ she said, looking at the notes while she positioned the equipment.

‘Second,’ Mari said. ‘Twins. Miscarried at five months. Twenty years ago.’

She pressed a hand to Mari’s shoulder. ‘So unfair. Let’s take a look at this baby and check everything’s okay.’

Mari bared her belly for the gel and the transducer. The screen on the ceiling was turned away. There was no point watching that, so she closed her eyes and tried to ignore Dom sitting beside her, tried to put him out of her mind. The gel was cold, the transducer pressure on her belly she could have done without, but the sonographer was efficient with her work. Moving the transducer over her skin, searching for angles and finding them, clicking to take measurements and even more measurements. It might have been twenty years ago, but Mari had been there before.

The sonographer stopped clicking. ‘Can you excuse me? I just have to check something with my colleague. I’ll be right back.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mari, but the woman was gone. Mari looked at Dom. ‘Something’s wrong. Why would she leave like that?’

‘Because she had to check something with a colleague.’

‘About what?’

‘I don’t know. Why do you think there’s something wrong?’

‘Because otherwise she wouldn’t have to check. She says it’s a colleague, but she means a doctor. They only do that when there’s something wrong. Otherwise, she’d show me the pictures and send me home with a photo.’

‘You don’t know that,’ he said.

‘I know it. Something’s not right. Something’s wrong.’

He reached out a hand to her and she took it, clinging to it with both hands like a lifeline. And for the first time she admitted that she was glad that Dom was here, because this wasn’t just her child but Dom’s too. He needed to be here.

The sonographer reappeared, together with another white-coated woman who identified herself as a doctor.

‘What’s wrong?’ Mari asked. She was thirty-nine years old—a geriatric pregnancy as some called it, where any number of things could go wrong. Especially following a previous miscarriage.

The doctor smiled benevolently. ‘Don’t worry. Just checking a few things. It won’t take a moment.’

She took the transducer, moving it over Mari’s skin. Mari flinched at the pressure of both an overfull bladder and things unknown. When the hell would they let her pee? When the hell would they stop torturing her and tell her what was wrong? She was thirty-nine years old. She wasn’t a child that needed to be protected. If something was wrong, she wanted to know what it was.

A minute later the doctor nodded to the sonographer as she pulled the device away. ‘I’m sorry to put you through that added stress, Ms Peterson, but we needed to be sure as it’s sometimes difficult to determine at an early stage. But my colleague here was right. I’m hoping this might make up for what happened in the past. Congratulations,’ she said, wiping the gel from her belly with paper towels. ‘There are two heartbeats. You’re expecting twins.’

Shock ricocheted through her.

‘No!’ she heard herself calling as she curled into a ball on the bed. If she could squeeze her eyes shut long enough, she might wake up and find this had all been a dream, a horrible, ghastly dream. Discovering she was pregnant, Dom turning up on her doorstep unannounced, learning that she was pregnant with twins.

Again.

History was repeating itself. Mocking her. Congratulations had no place in the circumstances. Condolences would be more appropriate. One baby was bad enough, but two was akin to scraping away the scars of the past with a box grater and rubbing salt into them.

‘No,’ she said, tears streaming down her face. ‘I lost them before. I can’t go through that again!’

The doctor patted her shoulder. ‘I understand, but there’s no reason to think that what happened before will happen again. You were unlucky, that’s all. You’ll have the best possible care, I can guarantee it.’

‘But twins…’

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