Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 116193 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116193 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
“Yup. He is ready for his grand entrance into the world, all right. Keep breathing.” She patted my knee. I’d never quite understood this expression. Did one ever stop breathing voluntarily? Specifically while giving birth?
Tiffany left the room, called the doctor, then poked her head back in. “What’s it gonna be? Is Daddy staying in to watch the birth?”
Chase and I exchanged glances. We’d planned every single thing about the birth in detail—the overnight bag we’d packed together when I was only seven months pregnant, the labor classes we’d taken, the breastfeeding plan—but we’d never talked about whether he was going to stay and watch or not.
“Up to you.” He cleared his throat. We held each other’s eyes. For a second, I thought we’d take out our phones and do the old banter dance-off. Then my husband surprised me by taking my hand. “Please.”
And I knew.
“Yes.” I grinned. “He stays.”
Forty-five minutes later, Ronan was out in the world, screaming up a storm. He had Chase’s bright-blue-silver eyes, my brown-honey hair, and two clenched fists with curiously long fingernails. He was like a baby dragon. I laughed and cried when Tiffany put him on my bare chest. Because I knew he was a gift from Mom and Ronan.
In fact, that was the one thing I’d written to baby Ronan in the very first letter I sat down to compose to him when I found out I was pregnant. One of many I intended to write. I told him he was a great, precious gift who wasn’t supposed to happen. That his daddy and I had been careful—I was on the pill and took it daily. The week the manufacturer of my birth control pills came out with a grand apology for their faulty pills, I’d realized I was a week and a half late. The idea of being pregnant hadn’t even registered to me before that, so I never kept up with the dates.
I took a pregnancy test. It was positive.
Chase and I were engaged to be married. But we still hadn’t spoken about the other C-word—children. I remembered the moment I’d found out. I sat on the closed toilet seat in Croquis’s restroom, ironically in the very stall where Chase and I had had sex months before, staring at the two blue lines, then looking up to the ceiling and smiling at the sky.
“Touché, Ronan and Mom.” I’d shaken my head. “Touché.”
Now, I had a son. Someone to love. To write letters to. To see grow.
I watched Chase pick him up, all bundled up like a burrito, with his little stripy hat. My husband smiled down at him, and my heart swelled.
“How I got her to say yes to me? Why, yes, Ronan, that’s a funny story. Let me tell you all about it . . .”