Chapter 4: The Biggest Surprise

The gel was cold on my stomach and my hands were freezing and I couldn't stop thinking one thing, over and over, like a prayer I was scared to finish.

Please stay. Whoever you are. Please just stay this time.

"You're allowed to breathe, you know," the sonographer said. She was young, kind eyes, a coffee stain on her sleeve like she'd been on since midnight.

"The last three times I breathed it didn't help."

"Three?"

"Miscarriages." The word never gets easier. "So forgive me if I don't get my hopes up."

She nodded, gentle, and pressed the wand lower.

Oliver hovered by the door with his arms crossed, jaw tight, hair a mess from two hours of driving through rain to get here.

"Sit down, Ollie. You're making the room smaller."

"I'm fine standing."

"You're vibrating."

"I said I'm fine." He didn't sit. He never sits when he's scared. "Just tell us it's okay. Is it okay?"

"Did you call Mom?"

"Of course I called Mom. She wanted to get on a plane. I told her to wait till we knew something." He rubbed the back of his neck. "She cried, Aurora. On the phone. She kept saying she should've made you leave him years ago."

"It's not her fault."

"That's what I said. She didn't hear it." He glanced at the machine, then away, like looking at it too long might jinx something. "Are you warm enough? You want another blanket? Say the word."

"I want you to sit down."

He didn't sit.

The sonographer wasn't answering.

She'd gone quiet. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, and her hand moved slowly, carefully, back and forth, back and forth, and I watched her mouth press into a flat line.

My stomach dropped through the table.

"What," I said. "What is it? Say it."

"One moment."

"No, don't do 'one moment,' I know what 'one moment' means, I've heard 'one moment' three times, just tell me, is there a heartbeat, is there..."

"There's a heartbeat," she said.

I let out a breath that shook the whole bed.

"Oh thank God." Oliver's arms dropped. "Okay. Okay, one heartbeat. That's good, right? That's good."

"Ms. Bennett." The sonographer's eyes hadn't left the screen. "Hold on."

She slid the wand a few centimeters to the left.

"There's another one."

The room went very still.

"Another what," I whispered.

"Another heartbeat."

Oliver made a strangled noise. "Two? Twins? She's having twins?"

The sonographer didn't laugh, didn't smile, just kept moving the wand with this focused, almost disbelieving frown, and my whole body went cold and hot at once.

"Wait," she said, mostly to herself.

"Wait what. Wait what."

"There's a third."

I grabbed the rail of the bed. "That's not, no, that's, you're seeing the same one twice, screens do that, right, they mirror or..."

"They don't mirror, Ms. Bennett."

She turned the monitor toward me.

I didn't understand what I was looking at. Just grainy grey shapes, flickering, and four little pulses of white, four tiny frantic strobes, each one in its own small dark pocket.

"There's a fourth," she said quietly.

Oliver sat down. His legs just went out from under him and he landed hard in the plastic chair and stared at the wall.

"Say it again," I breathed. "Say the number out loud. I need to hear the number."

The door opened and the doctor from last night came in, reading glasses pushed into her hair, chart in hand, and she looked at the screen, then at my face, and I saw her actually take a small step back.

"Well," she said softly.

"How many," I said.

She came to the bedside. She looked at the screen one more time, like she was double checking a thing she already knew.

"Ms. Bennett." Her voice was careful and warm and stunned all at once. "You're carrying quadruplets. Four. All four with clear, strong heartbeats."

Four.

The number went into me and something broke open, but not the way things had been breaking open all night. Not the tearing, ugly kind.

This came up from somewhere underneath all of it, and I started to cry, and I couldn't stop, and Oliver was up and at my side gripping my hand and saying my name and I couldn't answer because I was laughing too, laughing and crying at the same time like a woman coming apart, but I wasn't coming apart.

For the first time in a year I was coming back together.

"Four," I kept saying. "Four. There's four."

"Aurora." Oliver's voice cracked right down the middle. "Aurora, breathe, is that, are you happy, I can't tell if you're, are you okay?"

"I painted three rooms," I said. Nothing else made sense so I said that. "In my head. Three times. I painted a little room and picked a name and then I had to unpaint it. Three times, Ollie."

"I know." He pressed his forehead to my hand. "I know you did."

"And now there's four." I pressed my other hand flat to my stomach, over the cold gel, over all four of them. "Four at once. After nothing. After everything he said I couldn't do it."

"He's an idiot," Oliver said, voice wet. "He's the biggest idiot alive and he doesn't even know it yet."

"No," I said. "He doesn't."

And there it was, the first thing all night that felt like power instead of pain. He didn't know. He was out there right now, under the lights, toasting his new future with a child that wasn't his, and he had no idea that the woman he threw away in the rain was lying in a hospital bed with four of his real ones flickering on a screen.

I almost laughed at the size of it.

The doctor crouched by the bed. "I have to be honest with you. A quadruplet pregnancy is high risk. Very high risk, given your history. This is going to be the hardest thing you've ever done, and I won't pretend otherwise."

"I don't care."

"You'll need constant monitoring. Rest. No stress, and I mean none, which given what walked in here last night I know is asking a lot."

"You saw the news," I said flatly.

She didn't deny it. "Half the hospital saw the news."

Oliver's head came up. "Then you know who the father is."

The doctor looked at me, and she didn't answer him. She was giving me the room. She was letting me decide, right there, what the truth was going to be.

And I felt it settle in my chest, hard and clean, like a door closing for good.

"He doesn't have a father," I said.

Oliver blinked. "Aurora."

"You heard me."

"Aurora, they're his. Damien's. He can't just, he took your whole life, he doesn't get these too, but he's, legally he's..."

"He named another woman's child his heir tonight." My voice didn't shake. That surprised me most of all. "In front of cameras. He called me defective. His mother stood up in a ballroom and laughed while people clapped."

"I know, I was watching it on my phone, I know."

"So he doesn't get to know." I looked at the screen, at the four small flickers still pulsing away, oblivious, alive. "The second he finds out, they stop being mine and they start being Blackwoods. Assets. Heirs. His mother would have lawyers on us before they could walk. You know I'm right."

Oliver's jaw worked. He wanted to argue. He couldn't.

"You're right," he said finally, quietly. "I hate it. But you're right."

"There's more." I gripped his hand. "Nobody knows. Not the neighbors, not your friends, not anybody who might sell it. Four babies that show up nine months after that ballroom, do the math the way the whole internet's already doing it. It has to be like they came from nowhere."

"From nowhere." He nodded slowly, working it through. "So we leave. You can't have them here, Aurora. Not in this city. His mother's eyes were everywhere."

"I know."

"Mom and me, we'll figure the money out."

"I know you will." My throat tightened. "I'm not doing it to you both. I'll figure my own money out. But yeah. We leave."

The sonographer wiped the gel from my stomach with a warm cloth, careful, almost reverent, and clicked the machine off.

I lay there in the sudden quiet, in the ruined party dress they hadn't made me change out of yet, and I looked at the frozen picture still glowing on the screen, four heartbeats caught mid-flutter, and I made the vow that would run the rest of my life.

"I don't need him anymore," I whispered, and I finally, fully believed it.