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Pace steps away from the window, brows knitting together. “You can tell on that thing?”

“Already?” I gape at him, my heart beginning to flutter again.

Lex shrugs, rising to his feet. “It’s early, but still possible.”

“Here’s a question,” Wicker says, fanning the cards out. “Who cares? Girl, boy, it’s all the same.”

Glaring at him, I reply, “I care,” and stand, striding to Lex. Pace gets there first, the three of us pausing to look back.

“Wick,” Lex says, rubbing a thumb into his eye. “We do this together, or we don’t do it at all.”

There’s a tense beat where Wicker just dances a card along his knuckles, the curve of his shoulders tired and dejected.

I don’t exhale until he pushes to his feet.

* * *

“Cold,”I hiss, clenching up against the ultrasound gel.

Rubbing it in with the wand, Lex says, “Sorry,” but it sounds more like, “Deal with it.”

Pace is on my other side, hovering over me like a bat. “Is that it?”

“No,” Lex says, sliding him a warning look. He pushes the wand harder, the pressure almost too much to bear.

“I should have peed first,” I lament, grimacing.

“No, it’s good,” Lex insists, adjusting his elbow. “The waves travel better through fluid.”

From the other side of the room comes a metallicclink-clink. “Jesus, this is some medieval shit. We should put one of these down in the dungeon.”

Without even glancing away from the screen, Lex says, “Leave the speculum alone, Wick.”

He’s squeezing it like scissors, and then making a hole with his hand and shoving it through. “Christ,” he says, pulling a face. “Another check in the ‘glad I have a dick’ column.”

“That’s it, there?” Pace guesses, pointing to the screen.

But Lex shakes his head. “Give me a second.”

Huffing, Pace checks his phone. “We’ve got thirty minutes. You wasted all that time disinfecting—”

But he falls silent when thewooshbegins filling the room. I’d know that anywhere, even though it’s more defined now, louder, thrumming hard like hummingbird wings.

Lex’s whole body is tense, like he’s straining to hold the position. “There it is,” he says. “Right in the center.”

He doesn’t need to tell me. It’s a bigger blob than it was the first couple of times, but most of all, I’m struck dumb by the shape of it. “There’s a head,” I say, utterly awed. Later, I’ll think back on that and laugh. Of course, there’s a head. I just couldn’t see it last time.

This time, it’s so obvious.

The baby has a head.

Mybaby has a head.

That head could have red hair like me. Or—I think, glancing at a similarly stupefied Pace—curly and dark like him. Or wavy and auburn like Lex. Or blonde like Wicker. It’s overwhelming to think of all the potential that head could hold one day. Knowledge. Feelings. Personality.

“I think I see…oh.” Lex adjusts, spine straightening, and he glances at me first. That’s what I’ll remember about the moment, later on—the way his eyes locked on mine before sliding to his brother. “It’s a boy.”

A loudclankmakes me jolt, Lex losing the image, but it’s just Wicker, casually tossing the speculum aside.