Page 60 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

The doctor prepared the jelly, warning, “This is going to be cold,” before spreading it on Jenna’s lower abdomen.

Jenna’s heart beat furiously in her chest, a strange pressure mounting. The doctor had said they thought everything was fine, so why did Jenna’s sense of warning refuse to wane?

She was at the hospital with the father of her baby for the first time—it made the fact that they would be parents real in a way that all of their talks and time spent together had not.

And then the room filled with the thundering hoofbeat sound that heralded the beginning of a new era in her life.

Beside her, Sebastian froze, his entire focus halted and held by a sound, stopping him as powerfully as it did her—she felt it all as if experiencing the shock along with him through the special bond they shared.

“There’s the little one. Sounds strong and healthy,” the doctor said, ear cocked, listening to the sound, moving the wand around, and watching the screen until exclaiming, “Ah. And there we are.”

The grainy black and gray and white of the screen showed an obvious head and body. Limbs and bones appeared and disappeared on the screen as the doctor moved the wand around over Jenna’s abdomen, happily chattering away while the baby’s heartbeat thundered in the background. “Baby looks good, now let’s find the placenta, shall we... Ah, yes. Here we go. Attachment is strong, and the cord is nice and thick and not tangled in there.”

The doctor’s words were comforting, affirming.

Jenna barely registered them.

Her baby was beautiful. It was a blob with bones and a head, yes, but it was a perfectly formed head. Genius bones. And though she knew it was absurd, she could have sworn she saw Sebastian in the shape of its little skull.

Her child was astonishing, instantly the most amazing being she had ever seen in her life.

And seeing that perfection for the first time, hearing the drum of the heartbeat that would be the rhythm of its entire life, Jenna knew that what had been enough in the face of all of Sebastian’s trauma, and over the past month—playing house and making love—was by no means enough now.

In fact, enough wasn’t even the right bar to set.

Magnificent. Spectacular. Abundant.

She and her baby deserved not what they could get, but the very best life could offer. Looking at them, it was suddenly, irrevocably and abundantly clear that they were part of something large and longer, the vast length of human history, and that each and every linked soul in it was a kind of miracle, utterly and absolutely deserving of every specific dream and wish their heart desired—herself included.

She could never accept enough for her baby. Her mother could never accept enough for her, and so on, unbroken, backward and forward. She could not settle.

And leaving things like this, the future ambiguous in its lack of specific key features she had always wanted it to include, would be settling. For her, for their baby and even for Sebastian—though he still didn’t get that he too lost out by denying them what she wanted.

But accepting anything less than exactly what she wanted would be settling. Like sins revealed in the face of God, filled with a new awareness of her baby, she could no longer do it.

In the halogen lights of the doctor’s office, in the face of the being whose presence was the manic galloping sound in the room, she realized it was never a matter of enough but how much—how much life and joy and love she could shove into the precious short time she would have to be her child’s world.

Like cosmic curtains had been opened, clarity flooded Jenna. Her baby deserved a whole family. She deserved a whole family. And her baby also deserved a rich childhood full of laughter and warmth and pride in family and confidence in place and belonging—a strong starting place from which to jump off from when the time inevitably came for them to leap off and create their own belonging and place in the world.

Just like she had had.

Sebastian had been right when he’d insisted that she belonged in the capital, and in the queen’s guard. He’d been trying to tell her, he’d even shown her, but it was only now she was seeing—she belonged wherever she put in the time and effort to be. She belonged in the place she had been building for herself all along. Destiny wouldn’t carve a place for her, it merely provided the tools and circumstances with which she could build one for herself. And, as she’d always known but seemed to have recently forgotten, it was up to her to establish its shape and boundaries. It was up to her to identify her moral standard and stick to it. She had to do what was right according to the voice inside. She could not settle. Not even out of love.

With the tsunami of fear for her child broken, the bright light of understanding had dawned, and in it, she was left to see exactly the wreckage she was dealing with, and it was love. Absolute, devastating love. The thing Sebastian had so feared had gone right ahead and snuck up on Jenna, caught her in its net and convinced her to forget her integrity as surely as it had his father.

But she had learned.

She would have to pick up and repair all of the parts of herself that had been willing to accept anything less than the fully realized life experience she wanted for herself and her child—including all of the rubble of the rest of her fears, desires, loneliness and illusion.

She loved Sebastian.

But as much as she wanted him, and loved him, she couldn’t have him, not with what he offered.

If it wouldn’t mean losing sight of the mesmerizing creature on the screen, she would have squeezed her eyes shut in resistance to the dawning realization.

As it was, it was their child on the screen that gave her the strength and insight to finally make her stand.

The joy of sharing this moment with Sebastian in the flesh, after the threat of danger had passed, was matched only by her dread of knowing she had to walk away from him.

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