Page 185 of The Wild Card

I laugh into his chest, and he holds me tighter, and the morning sun moves across the cabin floor in slow gold stripes, and I think: Yeah. So worth it.

Chapter Forty-Four

Two Years Later

Crew

The waiting room at Dallas Maternal & Fetal Medicine has exactly twelve chairs, two outdated magazines about breastfeeding, and a watercolor painting of a stork that looks mildly threatening.

I know this because I’ve counted everything twice.

Emmie’s hand is in mine. She’s twenty weeks today. Halfway. The bump is real now—not the “is she pregnant or did she eat a big lunch” stage. Actual, undeniable, she-grew-a-human bump that she cradles with one hand when she’s not thinking about it.

She’s doing it right now. Left hand on her belly, right hand in mine, her thumb tracing circles on my knuckle.

“You’re doing the thing,” she says without looking up from her phone.

“What thing?”

“The scanning-the-room thing. Like someone’s going to breach the lobby of an OB-GYN office.”

“I’m not scanning. I’m observing.”

“You counted the chairs.”

“Twelve.”

“And the exits?”

“Two. Plus a window in the bathroom that could work in an emergency, but it’s a tight fit.”

She looks up at me. Those hazel eyes, warm and amused and so full of something that still makes my chest ache even after two years of marriage.

“We’re at the baby doctor, Crew. Not a black ops site.”

“Preparedness is a lifestyle, not an event.”

She snorts and goes back to her phone. She’s scrolling through a list of names she’s been building for weeks—a shared Google doc that currently has sixty-three entries, color-coded by her (obviously) and annotated by me (pros, cons, historical significance, and a threat-assessment column that she says is “unhinged” but hasn’t asked me to remove).

We don’t know the sex yet. Today we find out. Or we don’t—Emmie keeps going back and forth.

“I want to know,” she said this morning, standing in front of the mirror in one of my t-shirts, hand on her bump.

“Okay.”

“Actually, I don’t. I want it to be a surprise.”

“Okay.”

“No, I want to know. Definitely. How else will I plan the nursery?”

“Your mother already planned the nursery. She sent blueprints.”

“Those were suggestions, not blueprints.”

“There were measurements, Emmie. And a materials list. That’s a blueprint.”

She kissed me and said, “We’ll decide when we get there.”