Then she stopped.
Just for a second. Her hand hovered over the lower back a beat longer than it needed to. Then she smiled, said everything looked fine, and moved on like nothing had happened.
Claire didn’t seem to notice.
Daniel did.
I watched him stare at the monitor with an expression I couldn’t read at all — not worry exactly, something stranger than that. He barely said a word the whole drive home.
I remember sitting in the back seat, one hand on my belly, watching the back of my brother’s head and thinking: something is wrong with him, not with her.
I had no idea how right I was, or how far from the truth I still was about what it actually meant.
Three weeks later, I was in a delivery room gripping a nurse’s hand hard enough to leave marks, about to find out.
