Chapter 1 - The Two Lines
When I showed Ryan the positive pregnancy test, he didn't say anything for three full seconds. He just stared at the little plastic stick like it might change its mind.
Then his whole face cracked open into a grin.
"Are you serious right now?"
I was laughing so hard from where I sat on the kitchen floor that I could barely nod. He scooped me up off the tile and spun me around once before setting me back down, both hands still on my shoulders like he needed to touch me to believe it.
"We're having a baby!" he shouted, loud enough that our neighbor banged on the wall twice.
Neither of us cared.
Three weeks later, at the ultrasound, the technician moved the wand around my stomach and went quiet for a beat too long. Then she smiled and turned the monitor toward us.
"There are two in there."
Ryan blinked at the screen. "Two what?"
"Two babies."
For a second the room just sat there, humming with the machines. Then Ryan let out a laugh that came from somewhere deep in his chest.
"Twins? We're having twins?"
On the ride home he wouldn't stop talking. He counted on his fingers like he was doing math homework.
"Two cribs. Two car seats. Two college funds we don't have yet."
"Ryan, please."
"And a way bigger coffee maker. That part isn't up for discussion."
I laughed until my stomach hurt, which, at four months along, wasn't hard to do. I remember thinking we had decades stretched out ahead of us. Decades to figure out the money, the sleep schedule, which one of us would finally learn to fold a fitted sheet.
Ryan was always the steady one. Every time I spiraled about premature labor or daycare costs or whether either of us actually knew how to keep two babies alive at once, he'd give me the same three words.
"We'll handle it."
Our apartment slowly disappeared under baby gear. Cribs leaned against the hallway wall waiting to be assembled. Tiny clothes hung over every chair. Ryan's mother, Denise, started showing up two or three times a week with casseroles and unsolicited advice about swaddling.
Looking back now, I understand she wasn't just checking on me.
She was watching Ryan.
One Saturday, while he was up on a ladder painting the nursery a pale yellow, he climbed down too fast and grabbed the back of a chair like the floor had tilted under him.
"You okay?" I asked.
"I'm fine." He waved me off without turning around.
Denise's head snapped up from the folded laundry in her lap. "Ryan."
"I'm fine, Mom." He shot me a smile over his shoulder, easy as anything. "Paint fumes. That's all."
I believed him. Why wouldn't I?
Over the following weeks he started getting tired faster than usual. He blamed it on work. Then he blamed stress. Then he blamed getting the apartment ready for two babies at once, which, fair enough, would wear anyone down.
I took every excuse and filed it away without a second thought.
Then one evening, late in my third trimester, I found him sitting alone in the car in our parking spot with a stack of papers spread across his lap. When he saw me coming, he folded them fast and shoved them into the glove compartment.
"What's all that?"
"Work stuff."
"Since when do you do work stuff sitting in a parked car?"
"Since my wife covered every flat surface in our apartment with baby gear," he said, and the corner of his mouth pulled up. "A man needs somewhere to think."
I laughed and let it go. Again.
Not long after that, Ryan stopped driving altogether. Denise started taking us to my appointments instead, and Ryan joked from the back seat that my belly was so big by then, the twins could probably steer better than he could.
Even on the days he looked pale, even on the days a simple chore left him needing to sit down halfway through it, he still found a way to make me laugh before I noticed anything was wrong.
Three weeks before Ellie and Jack were born, Ryan died.
The world just stopped and started over without him in it. One day his shoes were by the front door and his jacket was slung over the kitchen chair. The next, I was getting ready to give birth alone.
My son and daughter never got to meet their father.
Denise moved into our spare room and never really left. She took the two a.m. feedings. She did the laundry, made the meals, sat with me on the floor during the nights grief hit so hard I couldn't stand up.
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For an entire year, she was the reason I kept going.
And for that entire year, she was also sitting on the biggest secret of my life.
