it was something else. Yeah, right. Fat chance. And she may as well face the reality until she decided what she was going to do and how she was going to manage this.
He was asking again, ‘Would you like me to ask a nurse to come in? My receptionist has gone home. Just while we do this?’
God, no. ‘No, thank you, if that’s okay. Please. I don’t want anyone to know.’ She covered her eyes. She didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t say that.
‘I understand.’ His voice was low, that trace of accent rough with sympathy, and she had the sense he really did understand a little how she was feeling.
Maybe she was even glad he was there to be a stabiliser while she came to grips with this, except for the fact she’d have to see him almost every day at work, and he’d know her secret.
‘Just do it.’ Lucy climbed up onto the examination couch in his rooms, feeling ridiculous, scared and thoroughly embarrassed. Lucy closed her eyes and the mantra kept running through her head. This could not be happening.
Nikolai switched on the little portable ultrasound machine he kept in the corner of his rooms. This must have been how his sister had felt when she’d found out the worst thing a sixteen-year-old Greek Orthodox girl could find out. He just hoped there was someone here for this young woman.
He tried not to notice the unobtrusively crossed fingers she’d hidden down her sides as he tucked the towel across her upper abdomen to protect her purple scrubs from the gel. He didn’t like her chances of the test strip being disputed by ultrasound.
He tucked another disposable sheet low in her abdomen, definitely in professional mode, and squirted the cool jelly across the not so tiny mound of her belly. She had silky, luminous skin and he tried not to notice.
When he felt her wince under his fingers, he paused until he checked she was okay, and she nodded before he recommenced the slide of the ultrasound transducer sideways. He couldn’t help but admire the control she had under the circumstances. He wondered if Chloe had been this composed.
He glanced from her to the screen and then everything else was excluded as he concentrated on the fascinating parallel universe of pelvic ultrasound.
An eerie black-and-white zone of depth and shadings. Uterus. Zoom in. Foetal spine. So the foetus was mature enough for morphology. Foetal skull. Measure circumference. Crown-rump length. Placenta. Cord. Another cord?
He blinked. ‘Just shutting the blinds so I can see better.’ He reached across to the wall behind her head and the remote-control curtains dulled the brightness of the Queensland sun. Zoomed in closer. Uh-oh.
The room dimmed behind Lucy’s closed eyelids and then she heard it. The galloping hoofbeats of a tiny foetal heart. No other reason to have a galloping horse inside her belly except the cloppety-clop of a baby’s heartbeat.
She was pregnant.
It was true. She couldn’t open her eyes. Was terrified to confirm it with sight but her ears wouldn’t lie.
She couldn’t cope with this. Give up her hard-won career just when it was starting. Throw away the last three years of intense study, all the after-hours work to pay for it, all her dreams of being the best midwife GCG had ever seen.
Cloppety-clop, cloppety-clop. The heartbeat of her baby, growing inside her. Her child. Something shifted inside her.
She had to look. She opened her eyes just as Dr Kefes sucked in his breath and she glanced at his face. She saw the frown as he swirled the transducer around and raised his eyebrows.
What? ‘Has it got two heads?’ A flippant comment when she was feeling anything but flippant. Was her baby deformed? Funny how the last thing she wanted was to be pregnant but the barest hint of a problem with her tiny peanut and she was feeling…maternal?
‘Sort of.’ He clicked a snapshot with the machine and shifted the transducer. Clicked again.
Her stomach dropped like a stone. There was something wrong with her baby?
‘What?’
‘Sorry. Not what I meant.’ He was looking at her with a mixture of concern and…it couldn’t be wonderment surely. ‘Congratulations, Lucy.’
That didn’t make sense. Neither did a second heartbeat, this one slower than the other but still a clopping sound that both of them recognised. ‘The measurements say you have two healthy fourteen-week foetuses.’
‘I’m sorry?’ He had not just said that. ‘Two?’
‘Twins.’ He nodded to confirm his words. Held up two fingers in case she still didn’t get it.
Lucy opened and shut her mouth before the words came out. ‘Twins? Fourteen weeks?’ Lucy squeaked, and then the world dimmed, only to return a little brighter and a whole lot louder than before—like a crash of cymbals beside her ear. She wasn’t just pregnant. She was seriously, seriously pregnant.
She watched the screen zoom in and out in a haze of disbelief. Followed his finger as he pointed out legs and arms. And legs and arms. Two babies!
‘I don’t want twins. I don’t want one,’ she whispered, but even to her own ears there might be a question mark at the end of the sentence. She couldn’t really be considering what she thought she was considering.
She thought briefly of Mark, her midwifery colleague already settled in Boston at his new job, a good-time guy with big plans. Their actions had been a silly impulse, regrettable but with no bad feelings, more a connection between two euphoric graduates than any kind of meeting of souls.
They’d both been sheepish after the event. The whole ‘do you want coffee, can I use your bathroom’, morning-after conversation that had made it very clear neither had felt the earth move—friends who should never have been lovers.
Dr Kefes broke into her thoughts and she blinked. ‘If you are going to think about your options you don’t have much time. In fact, you may not have any.’
Think about what? Terminating her babies that she’d heard? Seen? Was now totally aware of? She didn’t know what she was going to do but she couldn’t do that.
‘Do they look healthy? Are they identical?’ From what she’d learned about twin pregnancies there’d be more risk with identical twins than fraternal and already that was a worry.
‘Looks to be one placenta but it’s hard to tell. Early days, to be sure. They look fine.’ His accent elongated the word fine and her attention zoned in on something non-traumatic—almost soothing—but he was forging on and she needed to pay attention. ‘Both babies are equal size. Nothing out of the ordinary I can see.’ He smiled and she was distracted for a second again from the whole tragedy. He was a serious darling, this guy. Then his words sank in.
Relief flooded over her. Her babies were fine. Relief?
She didn’t know how she would manage. Certainly with no help from her own mother—how on earth would she tell her?—but she would manage. And no way was she going to blame her babies like her mother had always blamed her for ruining her life.
But that was for home. For quiet, intense thought. And she’d held this kind
