Chapter 494: Both of You

Five days into the vigil, Arianne learned a body could keep breaking in small, private ways even while the crisis everyone else was watching stayed fixed in one hospital room down the hall.

The cramping woke her a little after midnight, low and unfamiliar, in the family suite the hospital had set aside without being asked twice so none of them had to drive home between visits to Franz’s bedside. What she found when she checked told her enough to stop breathing for a second before she made herself move, made herself find a nurse instead of standing in the hallway working through every worst possibility on her own.

The suite had emptied out for the night by the time she left it. Vincent had finally gone back to the house an hour earlier at Amanda’s insistence, both of them promising to be back before breakfast, and Aunt Estella had the twins at home where they belonged at that hour, asleep and unaware that anything new had happened at all. Arianne was glad of it walking down the corridor alone — glad no one else had to stand in a hallway at one in the morning not knowing yet whether there was anything to be afraid of.

Twenty minutes later she was lying in an exam room down the same corridor from her husband’s coma, a stranger’s hands pressed against her stomach while a machine behind her searched for something she hadn’t known to look for in herself.

"Miss Summers, you’re pregnant," the doctor said, watching her face for the reaction. "Roughly five weeks, based on what you’re telling me about your last cycle. The bleeding isn’t unusual this early. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything’s wrong."

"Doesn’t necessarily." Arianne heard her own voice come out flat, disconnected from the two words fighting for space in her chest at once. "What would make it mean something was wrong?"

"Heavier bleeding. Real pain, not cramping." The doctor set the chart down at the foot of the bed. "I want to see you again in a week regardless, just to confirm everything’s progressing the way it should. For tonight, rest is the only prescription I have."

"I don’t rest."

"I’ve already heard that about you." The doctor almost smiled, then let it go. "Try anyway. Whatever’s happening down the hall will still be happening in six hours whether you’ve slept or not. This will go better for both of you if you have."

"Both of us."

"Both of you." She said it plainly, no more room for argument in it than the first time. "One patient down the hall, one patient in front of me. I’d like to keep both of them stable tonight, if you’ll let me."

Arianne dressed alone once the doctor left, and sat on the edge of the exam table longer than she needed to, turning the word pregnant over until it stopped sounding like it belonged to someone else’s life. She’d wanted this since before the accident, since before the twelve weeks and the phone call and everything after it — wanted it enough that some nights she’d caught herself doing the math on when to bring it up with Franz once the film wrapped, once there was room in both their calendars for wanting something on purpose instead of by accident. She hadn’t expected to find out like this, alone in a borrowed gown at one in the morning, with the one person who should have been sitting beside her just down the hall and unconscious.

She found her way back to the family suite instead of Franz’s room, not ready yet to hold this next to him without falling apart in front of the monitors, and Gilbert was awake at the small kitchen table with two untouched cups of coffee gone cold, going through a folder of papers he set down the second she came through the door.

"You’re up," he said, and then he actually looked at her, and whatever he saw stopped him from finishing whatever he’d been about to say next. "What happened?"

"Nothing’s wrong. Or — " Arianne pulled out the chair across from him and sat before her legs decided the matter for her. "I don’t know yet if anything’s wrong."

"Arianne."

"I’m pregnant." She said it to the table first, then made herself look up at him. "I didn’t know. I found out because I woke up bleeding and thought — " She stopped, because saying the rest of that sentence out loud would make it real in a way she wasn’t ready for. "The doctor says the bleeding doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Five weeks. That’s as far as she could tell tonight."

Gilbert didn’t say anything for a long moment, and when he finally reached across the table and took both her hands in his, the crying she’d been holding off since the exam room broke loose all at once, ugly and unstoppable, her shoulders shaking with a force that had nowhere else to go.

"He doesn’t know." The words came out broken between breaths. "He’s right down the hall and he doesn’t know, and I don’t know if I get to tell him, and I don’t know if there’s even going to be anything left to tell him by the time he wakes up to hear it."

"Hey." Gilbert came around the table and pulled her up into him, steady in a way that let her fall apart without either of them tipping over. "You’re allowed to be happy about this. Even tonight. Especially tonight."

"I can’t feel it yet. The happy part." She pressed her face into his shoulder, her breath coming in the same uneven pulls as the twins’ had four nights ago, the echo of it enough to undo her twice over in the same hour. "I keep trying to reach for it and all I find is how much more there is to lose now."

"Then let me hold the happy part until you can carry it yourself." Gilbert kept one hand flat between her shoulder blades, an old, familiar weight she’d leaned on more times over the years than either of them had ever counted out loud. "You don’t have to do all of it alone tonight. Not this part, and not the part where you go tell Uncle Vincent and Auntie Amanda in the morning, and not whatever this investigation still owes you either."

"Any movement on that?"

"Lucas has everything from Petra’s report cross-referenced against the access logs. He thinks the pieces are close to fitting into something he can hand the authorities outright, maybe within the week." Gilbert eased back enough to look at her properly. "It’s not tonight’s problem. Neither is telling Franz. Both of those will still be there in the morning."

"You’re keeping a list. Whatever’s not tonight’s problem."

"Somebody has to. You’ve been carrying all of it at once since the airfield, and none of it’s gotten lighter because you refused to set any of it down." Gilbert said it plainly, no edge in it despite the weight the words carried. "Let me carry the list tonight. You carry the news."

"And tonight’s problem?"

"Tonight’s problem is getting you to actually rest, since apparently the doctor already tried that argument on you once." He nodded toward the small bedroom off the suite’s living area. "I’ll sit with you until you’re asleep, and I’ll wake you the second there’s any change on Franz. That’s the whole plan."

Arianne let him walk her the short distance to the bedroom, too tired now to argue with a plan that asked so little of her, and sat on the edge of the bed with her hand resting flat against her stomach, trying to find the shape of something that had existed inside her for five weeks without her ever noticing it was there.

"I wanted this," she said, low enough that Gilbert had to lean in to catch it. "I wanted this so much, and I can’t even say it out loud without being afraid of what it costs to want it right now."

"You’re allowed to want two things you’re afraid of losing at the same time." Gilbert pulled a chair over from the small desk and sat beside the bed instead of leaving. "Loving this many people at once costs exactly this much — both fears sitting in you side by side, neither one canceling out the other."

"Don’t tell Vincent and Amanda yet. Not until I’ve had a chance to tell them myself, the right way, not as something they overhear secondhand."

"They’ll hear it from you and no one else." Gilbert said it like a promise he intended to enforce personally. "Franz too, whenever he’s able to hear it. That’s yours to give him, not mine to hand over ahead of you."

She lay back finally, one hand resting where the doctor had pressed her own a half hour earlier, and let herself hold both fears side by side instead of choosing between them, Gilbert still in the chair beside her when sleep finally took the choice out of her hands entirely.