Kate Is Pregnant with Your Child

A few months into the honeymoon, the happiness settles into something steadier.

It doesn't fade. It just stops being a firework and becomes a floor, something solid you can stand on without thinking about it. You wake up, and Kate is there. You come home, and Kate is there. The apartment smells like her shampoo and the burnt edge of whatever she was cooking, and you realize you've stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Kate, meanwhile, takes up space.

You notice it in small ways first. She stops apologizing when she bumps into furniture. She leaves her sneakers in the middle of the hallway like she owns the hallway, which, you suppose, she does. She argues with the delivery app about a missing order for ten full minutes and wins. And at the store, the manager pulls her aside one afternoon and offers her a promotion to shift lead, with a raise that makes her stare at the paperwork like it might be a trap.

"They want me to manage people," she tells you that night, dropping onto the couch with her apron still on. "Me. I used to coordinate rooftop battles with four copies of myself, and I'm still nervous about the schedule board."

"You'll be great at it."

"I'll be terrifying at it," she corrects. "Last week I made Dwayne from the deli cry just by looking at him."

"He's a grown man who cried over a deli slicer."

"He's a grown man who knew exactly what he did." She grins, then flicks a loose bit of hair out of her face. "I said yes, by the way."

You were already halfway to hugging her when she said it.

She makes friends, too, real ones, the kind who text her memes and invite her to birthday dinners. There's Marisol from the register next to hers, who has opinions about everyone's love life, and Dwayne, who recovered from his trauma enough to bring Kate leftover brisket. There's the grumpy old man with the butterscotch candies, who one day pauses at her register and mutters, "You're all right, kid," which Kate repeats to you for three days straight like it's a medal of honor.

Even Raju changes. One evening, you open the door to take your food, and Kate is leaning against your shoulder in your oversized hoodie, laughing at something on her phone. Raju hands you the bag, glances up, and for the first time in the history of your acquaintance, makes direct eye contact. He holds it for a full second. Then he nods, very solemnly, as if acknowledging a great and terrible truth, and walks away without a word.

"Did that just happen?" Kate whispers.

"I think we've been seen."

"Five stars," she says. "I'm updating his rating."

And the loud noises stop bothering her. You only realize it one afternoon when a car backfires outside, an ugly, explosive crack that rattles the windows, and you flinch, and she doesn't. She just glances toward the street, shrugs, and goes back to peeling her orange.

"You didn't jump," you say.

She pauses. Looks at her hand, at the orange, at you. "Huh," she says quietly. "I guess I didn't."

The sky is harder.

You catch her at it one evening on the walk home from the corner store, a paper bag of groceries in your arms and Kate's hand tucked into your coat pocket with yours. The sun is dropping behind the buildings, turning the clouds orange and pink, and Kate's eyes drift upward, scanning the horizon in a slow, practiced sweep, the same way a person checks their mirrors on a highway.

You don't say anything at first. You just watch her do it.

"I do it every day," she admits, not looking at you. "Every time I go outside. I look up."

"For what?"

"I don't even know." She lets out a breath that fogs in the cold. "Viltrumites. Lizard League. Some guy in a cape about to ruin my afternoon. Twenty-something years of looking at the sky because something might fall out of it and try to kill me. It doesn't just turn off."

You squeeze her hand. "There's nothing up there, Kate. Just clouds and airplanes and, like, one very confused pigeon."

"I know." She finally turns her head and looks at you, and the sunset catches her dark eyes and turns them gold at the edges. "I know there's nothing. That's the thing. I know I'm safe. Because I'm with you."

It's said so simply, with such dry, steady certainty, that for a moment you forget how to walk.

"Okay," you manage.

"Okay," she agrees, and nudges you with her shoulder. "Now hurry up. The ice cream's melting, and I'm not sharing."

The sex, meanwhile, never slows down.

If anything, it becomes a project. Neither of you can get enough of the other, and after the first few weeks of enthusiastic improvisation, Kate announces over breakfast, with the calm of a woman reading a mission briefing, that you are going to be thorough.

"Thorough," you repeat.

"We're going to try everything." She spears a piece of egg. "Every position. Every combination. I want a checklist."

"You want a checklist."

"I had a checklist. For missions. It was the only thing that kept me alive." She points her fork at you. "I'm very good at checklists."

So you work through it. Missionary, because you start with the classics. Cowgirl and reverse cowgirl, because Kate has strong opinions about being in charge. Doggy style, spooning, standing up against the bedroom wall until the neighbors pound on theirs. The lotus, which Kate declares "extremely romantic and extremely bad for my knees." Sixty-nine, naturally. The mating press, which makes her swear in two languages. A few that require a level of flexibility you didn't know you had, and a couple that you both agree, after careful review, should never be attempted again.

There's the lazy Sunday kind, slow and tangled in the sheets. There's the quick kind, in the five minutes before one of you has to leave. There's the kind where you both start laughing halfway through because someone's elbow hit the headboard, and you end up finishing the whole thing in giggling, breathless pieces. You explore every inch of each other, learning what makes her gasp and what makes her go quiet, until you know her body like a language you've been studying your whole life.

And you stop being careful. Neither of you ever says it out loud. It just happens, one night after another, that the conversation about being careful never quite makes it past your lips, and the days stack up, and you lose count of how many times you finish inside her. You never think about the consequences, because when she's holding your face in her hands and looking at you like that, nothing else in the world is real.

There's a weekend you take at a cheap lakeside cabin, three hours out of the city, with a creaky bed, a woodstove, and absolutely no reason to ever leave. You pack a bag of groceries, intending to go on a hike. You barely see the daylight. When you finally stumble out onto the porch on Sunday afternoon, blinking and starving, Kate in your flannel and nothing else, she leans back against you and says, in a voice rough from laughing:

"We didn't hike."

"We hiked a little."

"We hiked to the kitchen."

"That counts."

She tips her head back and looks up at you, upside down, her bob hanging off her forehead. Her eyes are soft in a way that makes your chest ache.

"I love you," she says.

It isn't dramatic. It isn't a confession on a rainy rooftop. It's just a woman in a flannel shirt on a creaky porch, saying a true thing in the plainest words she has.

"I love you too, Kate," you answer, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world, like something you've known forever and are only now getting to say.

The test comes a few weeks later.

You notice first, though you try not to. Kate is late. Not by much, a few days, then a week. She doesn't say anything about it, and you don't either, but you catch her staring at the calendar on the fridge, and one morning she goes very quiet over her coffee, hand pressed flat against her stomach like she's checking for a pulse.

"Kate," you say carefully.

"Don't." She holds up a hand. "Don't say it until I know."

She disappears into the bathroom that afternoon with a plastic bag from the pharmacy, and you spend the next seven minutes pacing the apartment, straightening things that don't need straightening. You water the dead plant on the windowsill. It is still dead. You water it again anyway.

When she finally opens the door, she walks past you without a word and sits down on the edge of your bed, in her white camisole and white underwear, bare legs crossed at the ankle, the gray knit blanket bunched up behind her. The afternoon light pours through the window, catching the skyline beyond it and the little succulent on the nightstand that she somehow keeps alive. She looks at you. She's smiling, wide and bright and a little disbelieving, and she holds up the test between two fingers.

Two lines. A little display window with one word in it.

"I'm pregnant," Kate says. Her voice shakes, just slightly, in the middle. "We're going to be parents!"

The room goes very quiet.

You don't remember crossing it. One moment you're standing in the doorway, and the next you're on the bed, and your arms are around her, and she's laughing into your shoulder, and you're kissing her, her cheek, her forehead, her mouth, over and over.

"I love you so much," you tell her. "We are going to be great parents."

"We are going to be terrible parents," she says, still laughing. "We'll be the worst. We don't even own a car seat."

"We'll buy a car seat."

"We don't have a car."

"We'll buy a car."

"Oh my god." She leans back and looks at you with wet eyes, shaking her head. "Oh my god, we're going to be parents."

You end up on the bedroom floor an hour later, backs against the frame of the bed, the test sitting on the nightstand like a tiny, impossible trophy, neither of you quite able to stand. Kate has your hand in both of hers. She's stopped laughing. Her thumb moves back and forth across your knuckles.

"My mom died having us," she says quietly. "Me and Paul. I never told you that."

"You didn't have to."

"I'm not scared of the baby," she says. "I'm not. I'm just... scared of being the one in the room that day. Of leaving someone, like she did." Her mouth twists. "Dumb, right? I died, like, a hundred times, and this is what gets me."

"It's not dumb." You lift her hand and press it to your mouth. "And you're not going anywhere. Modern hospitals. Great doctors. And me, at your side, being deeply annoying about it."

"You'll hover."

"I'll hover so hard."

She laughs again, a damp, shaky sound, and rests her head on your shoulder. "Okay," she whispers. "Okay. I think I can do that."

You propose three days later, on the balcony, where she first told you what she wanted from this life.

You've been carrying the ring for weeks. You bought it before the test, from a small jeweler two towns over, using money you'd been quietly stashing in a coffee can in the closet, and every night you've been hiding it in a sock, because you are a deeply unoriginal man. You've practiced the speech in the mirror. You forget every word of it the second she steps out onto the balcony, wrapped in her hoodie, staring at the night.

"You're being weird," she says, not turning around.

"I'm not being weird."

"You've been weird for three days. You keep looking at the sock drawer."

"That's not..." You abandon the lie. You drop to one knee on the cold concrete, holding the little box in a hand that is absolutely shaking, and Kate turns, and sees you, and freezes.

"Kate Cha," you say. "Will you marry me?"

She doesn't hesitate for even a heartbeat.

"Yes!"

She throws herself at you so hard you nearly topple off the balcony, and the ring goes on her finger on the third try because neither of you can stop laughing. She cries a little. You pretend not to see. And when she finally pulls back, hair in her face, grinning, she says, "Took you long enough."

"I've known you for months!"

"Exactly. Months. That's, like, forever. Do you know how slowly time moves when you've died a hundred times?"

You kiss her to shut her up. It works for about four seconds.

You keep the wedding small, because you'd rather save the money for the baby.

It's in a community garden on the edge of town, borrowed for the afternoon, with folding chairs and string lights and a table of potluck dishes that Marisol insisted on organizing. Kate wears a simple cream dress, flats instead of heels, and her short black hair tucked back with a single white flower. She looks so beautiful that for a few seconds you forget what you're supposed to say, and the officiant has to clear his throat.

The guests are exactly who you'd expect. Marisol, crying already. Dwayne from the deli, in a tie he obviously borrowed from his dad. The grumpy old man with the butterscotch candies, sitting in the front row with his arms crossed, trying very hard not to look moved and failing completely. And in the back, wearing a slightly too-large suit, Raju, who catches your eye across the garden, raises two thumbs, and holds your gaze with total, unflinching confidence.

You have to look away before you lose it.

The vows are the two of you at your most honest. You talk about a strange morning, a stranger wish, and the woman who walked out of a flash of violet light and into the rest of your life. Kate keeps her promises short.

"I spent most of my life being a copy of someone," she says, her voice steady, her eyes locked on yours. "A spare. A backup. Someone who could be replaced. And then you picked me, and only me, and you've never once made me feel like I was second. So I promise to be the first thing you see every morning, and the last thing you steal blankets from every night, for as long as I live. Which, hopefully, is only one time this go-around."

The garden bursts out laughing. You're laughing too, with tears running down your face.

When the time comes, the officiant asks, and you both say it.

"I do."

It's only after the paperwork is signed, with the name that isn't quite hers printed on the line, that Kate squeezes your hand and whispers, "That's not my real name, you know."

"I know."

"But it's my real signature." She smiles. "That part's me."

Her toast later is perfect, dry as a bone. She raises a paper cup of sparkling cider, because the baby, and says, "Thank you all for coming to the wedding of a woman who got extremely lucky and a man who has absolutely no idea what he's gotten himself into. Eat the potato salad. It's Marisol's. It's incredible."

The wedding night stays behind a closed door.

You have made love hundreds of times by now, in every room and every position you could name, and yet the first time as husband and wife hits differently. It's slower. Quieter. You lie awake afterward, tracing the ring on her finger in the dark, and think the words in your head, Kate Cha is my wife, and they still sound insane, and they sound perfect.

For the honeymoon, you pick Cancun, because Mexico is cheaper, and a beach is a beach.

It's a small resort, sun-bleached and loud, with a pool bar that makes a perfectly respectable virgin piña colada. Kate lies on a lounge chair with a paperback and her belly just beginning to round beneath her swimsuit, watching the waves like they might do something unexpected. You spend your days wading in warm water and your nights on a balcony overlooking the sea.

And you spend a lot of time in the room.

Pregnancy, it turns out, does nothing to dull Kate's appetite for you. If anything, it makes her bolder, more demanding, and cheerfully shameless. She laughs at your caution. She tells you, firmly, that the doctor said it was fine. She guides you through a handful of carefully chosen positions, with the cheerful authority of a field commander, and you follow her lead without complaint.

On the last night, lying curled together on the bed with the ocean breathing through the window, she takes your hand and rests it on her stomach.

"Hi, kiddo," she whispers. "Say hi to Dad."

You can't feel anything. It's too early. But you whisper hello anyway.

The months pass.

Her belly grows heavier, and she moves a little more slowly, and she hates every second of it, and she's more beautiful than she has ever been. You learn to cook things with iron in them. You rub her aching feet on the couch at night while she scrolls her phone and complains about her swollen ankles in a long, creative stream of profanity. You deal with the mood swings, which range from sobbing at a laundry detergent commercial to threatening to throw a lamp at you because you breathed too loudly.

"I'm sorry," she says afterward, sniffling, hiding her face in a pillow. "I don't know what's wrong with me."

"You're growing a human being."

"It's rude of him to make me cry about laundry soap."

"He'll apologize when he's older."

And you keep having sex, long into the later months, cautious and clumsy and endlessly inventive. You find new safe positions, spooning mostly, and her on top when her back allows it, and a lot of well-placed pillows. She guides you through them with a half-smile and a raised eyebrow, and you realize you've never wanted her more.

One morning, near the end, you catch her standing in the bedroom with the sunlight pouring through the window, wearing a gray top that clings to her belly and jeans she's barely managed to button, a hand resting on the curve of her stomach. She hasn't noticed you in the doorway. She's looking at the framed print on the wall, one you bought together at a flea market, and she's smiling, a small, private, entirely unguarded smile, like she's listening to something only she can hear.

"Hey," you say softly.

She turns, still smiling. "He kicked."

"Yeah?"

"Come here."

She takes your hand and presses it flat against the swell of her belly, and after a moment, you feel it, a small, stubborn thump against your palm. Then another. A tiny, insistent knock from the inside.

You've never felt such pride and joy in your life. It's the kind of feeling no man who hasn't stood where you're standing could ever understand. You look at her. She's looking at you.

"He's got your stubbornness," you whisper.

"He's got your terrible timing," she whispers back.

The day comes on a Tuesday, in the middle of the night.

It begins with a gasp and a hand on your arm, and then Kate's voice, strangely calm: "Okay. It's time." You find your keys on the second try, drop them on the third, and spend the drive to the hospital at an alarming speed while Kate breathes through her teeth in the passenger seat and says, "If you wreck this car, I will murder you, and I've done it before."

Labor takes eleven hours.

Kate is fierce through every one of them. She grips your hand so hard that you're certain something is permanently broken. She swears at the nurses, at the ceiling, at the concept of gravity itself. She tells you at one point that if you ever, ever touch her again, she will make you regret it, and then, thirty seconds later, begs you not to leave.

"I'm right here," you tell her, over and over. "I'm not going anywhere. I've got you."

She locks eyes with you, sweat-soaked and trembling, and for a second you see it, the fear of the room, the ghost of the woman she lost. You lean in, press your forehead against hers, and whisper, "You're not going anywhere either. You hear me? Not today. Not ever."

And then she screams, and pushes, and the room fills with a thin, furious wail.

They place him on her chest, a tiny, red, squalling thing with a full head of black hair, and Kate looks down at him as if she can't quite believe he's real. She's crying, and laughing, and holding him like he's the most fragile and most important thing in the entire multiverse.

She looks up at you, her eyes huge and wet and exhausted, and whispers, "Nobody has ever made me feel this safe."

You can't speak. You just kiss her forehead, and let your tears fall into her hair.

"I want to name him Paul," she says two days later, in the hospital room, the baby asleep against her collarbone.

You're sitting on the edge of her bed with a cup of terrible vending-machine coffee. You look at her, and she's staring down at the baby's face, her expression soft and a little sad.

"After my brother," she says. "The one I left behind. I don't know where he is, or what he's doing, or if he's even okay. But I want a piece of him with me. Is that stupid?"

You think about the other Paul, the one in her old world, with all the things you know and she doesn't. You think about the way she said I hope he's doing well on the balcony that night, and meant every word.

"It's not stupid," you say. "It's perfect."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Paul." You test the name out loud, and look at the sleeping baby, and a warm, enormous feeling expands in your chest. "Hi, Paul."

The baby sighs in his sleep. Kate laughs, and wipes her eyes.

New parenthood is a different kind of war.

There are sleepless nights, so many that the hours blur into a long, gray smear of bottles and burp cloths and quiet, desperate whispering at three in the morning. There are fights about nothing, over who forgot to buy diapers or who left the dish in the sink, and quiet makeups on the couch at dawn, foreheads pressed together, both too tired to stay angry. There's a stretch where Kate cries for no reason, and a stretch where you do, and a day you both lie on the floor while Paul screams in his crib and decide, in unison, to let him scream for ninety seconds because you simply can't move.

And there are the other moments. The first smile, which Kate swears was gas and you insist was love. The first time he grips your finger. The first time he says a word, which, for reasons neither of you can explain, is pigeon.

He takes his first steps at ten months, wobbling across the carpet toward his mother with his arms out and his jaw jutting forward in the exact stubborn set that Kate gets when she's about to win an argument. "That's my chin," she says proudly, scooping him up. And then, a week later, you find him in the hallway, sitting on the floor, crying because he's lost. In a hallway. Four feet from his own bedroom.

"Oh no," Kate says, watching from the kitchen. "He's got your sense of direction."

"That's not fair. He's a baby."

"You got lost in the grocery store last Tuesday."

"It was a big store!"

She grins, setting down her mug, and lifts Paul into her arms. He instantly stops crying and starts chewing on her hair.

It's late, one quiet night after he's finally gone to sleep, and the apartment is dark except for the faint glow of the nightlight in the hallway. You're lying in bed, Kate tucked against your chest, her breathing slow and warm against your collarbone. You thought she was asleep.

"I'm so happy you chose me," she murmurs. "Over the millions of other girls you could have chosen from the multiverse."

You tighten your arm around her, kissing the top of her head. "I'm glad I chose you too, Kate. No other girl could ever make me feel as happy as you do."

She tilts her face up and kisses you, slow and tender, and you taste the sweetness of everything you've been through.

Through the open bedroom door, you can hear the soft, steady rhythm of your son's breathing from the next room. You both lie there listening, smiling in the dark, with all the pride and love and warmth that only two people who love each other can share.