What If We’re Gonna Have Eight Kids

Three Years Earlier

The auditorium in Freeman Hall smelled like floor wax and the kind of ambition that costs twelve dollars to print on poster board. I knew this because I'd helped Ethan print his poster board at three in the morning at the campus copy shop, and the guy behind the counter had charged us twelve dollars and looked at us like we were insane.

"You know this is a pitch competition," he'd said. "Not a science fair."

Ethan had smiled. Not the kind of smile that acknowledged the joke. The kind that said *I'm going to prove you wrong and I'm going to enjoy it.*

That was Ethan. Twenty-three years old and already certain the world was a machine he could learn to operate. I was sitting in the fourth row of a plastic chair that creaked every time I shifted my weight, watching him adjust his tie backstage through the gap in the curtain. He kept loosening it, then tightening it, then loosening it again. His hands were steady. That's the part I remember. Not the tie—the hands.

The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed. Bright, flat, the kind that made everything look slightly overexposed. Someone two rows ahead of me was chewing gum with the focus of a man defusing a bomb. A Career Fair poster was peeling off the wall to my left, one corner curling up like it was trying to escape.

There were twelve presenters. Ethan was number nine. I knew this because I'd memorized the order, because I'd been nervous for him since Thursday, because that was the kind of girlfriend I was—the kind who counted things and worried in advance and showed up early to claim a good seat.

A girl in a business suit walked to the podium first. She was good. Confident. Her slides were clean and her voice didn't shake. I hated her for about four seconds and then felt bad about it, because I was a student teacher who graded papers in a coffee shop and she was presenting a business plan like she'd been doing it since birth.

The second presenter brought props. Actual physical props—a prototype of something that looked like a shoebox with wires. One of the judges leaned forward. The presenter's hands were shaking so badly he nearly dropped it. I wanted to tell him it was fine. That's what I did. Told people it was fine when it wasn't.

Third presenter was smooth. Too smooth. The kind of smooth that made you trust him and then immediately distrust yourself for trusting him. He used the word "disrupt" four times in two minutes.

Presenters four, five, and six blurred together. Something about sustainable agriculture. Something about an app for finding study partners. Something about cryptocurrency that I did not understand even a little. The guy in the back row had stopped chewing gum and started checking his phone.

Number seven went long. The moderator gave him the polite-but-firm "thirty seconds" gesture. He ignored it.

Number eight was a no-show.

And then Ethan.

He walked to the podium with the kind of stride that people have when they've rehearsed in front of a bathroom mirror. I'd seen him do it. Fourteen times. His roommate Jake had timed him with a stopwatch, and the last run had been four minutes fifty-three seconds, which was seven seconds under the limit, which Ethan had called "perfect."

He put his hands on the podium. White-knuckled at first. I could see it from the fourth row—the way his fingers pressed into the wood, then relaxed, then pressed again. He looked at the audience. Not at me, but at the room, scanning the rows like he was measuring it.

"The problem with affordable housing isn't the houses," he said. His voice was steady. "It's the math."

He clicked to his first slide. The numbers were there—unit costs, material savings, modular construction timelines. But it was the way he talked about them that did something. His voice dropped half a register when he hit the parts he was proud of. He forgot to blink when he was explaining the modular design. His hands moved—not rehearsed gestures, but real ones, the way people talk when they're so far inside an idea they forget they're being watched.

I leaned forward in the plastic chair. I'd stopped noticing the creak.

The pitch was five minutes long. He didn't go over. He didn't stammer. When a judge asked about supply chain logistics, Ethan answered without pausing, like the question had already occurred to him, like he'd been waiting for it. The judge nodded. Made a note.

I watched his hands on the podium. They'd stopped being white-knuckled somewhere around the second minute. Now they were loose, moving with the rhythm of his words. He believed every sentence coming out of his mouth. That was the thing about Ethan at twenty-three. He wasn't performing confidence. He had it. It was real and it was reckless and it was the most attractive thing I'd ever seen.

The girl sitting next to me—the one in the oversized cardigan who'd been taking notes the whole time—leaned over. "Who's that?"

"My boyfriend."

She raised her eyebrows. "Does he have a roommate?"

I laughed. It came out louder than I expected, and a few people turned around. I didn't care. I didn't care about anything right then except the way Ethan's hands moved when he talked about modular walls and factory timelines and a future he could see clearly that I couldn't see at all because I was looking at him instead of the slides.

The moderator called time. Ethan said thank you. He gathered his notes, nodded at the judges, and walked offstage. His tie was crooked. He hadn't noticed.

I sat there for a moment after he left, the way you sit in a movie theater after the credits start rolling, before you're ready to stand up. The plastic chair creaked. The lights buzzed. The Career Fair poster had given up entirely and was now lying on the floor.

I was going to marry that man.

The thought arrived without fanfare. No drumroll, no internal monologue about the meaning of commitment. It was just there, like a fact I'd always known—like the way you know your own name. I was twenty-two years old, sitting in a plastic chair that smelled like floor wax, and I had just decided the rest of my life.

I didn't know it was a decision. That would come later—much later, in a delivery room, in a moment I couldn't imagine from this chair. But my body knew. The way your body knows you're hungry before your brain catches up. The way you know to pull your hand away from a hot stove before you've registered the burn.

I stood up. The plastic chair squeaked against the floor. The girl in the cardigan looked at me. I was smiling and I didn't know I was smiling until I saw her expression, which was the expression people wear when they see someone else smiling and it makes them want to smile too.

I found him in the hallway afterward. He was standing by the vending machine, staring at the snacks through the glass like they held the answers to something. His tie was still crooked.

"How'd I do?" he said.

"You were good."

"How good?"

"You were yourself."

He grinned. The crooked one, where one side of his mouth went higher than the other. "Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation."

He bought two coffees from the vending machine and handed me one. It tasted like brown water and optimism. We walked. That was what we did—when something ended, good or bad, we walked. It had started in sophomore year, after our first real fight, when Ethan had said "let's just walk" and we'd walked for forty-five minutes in the rain and ended up at a diner where he'd ordered pie and I'd ordered nothing because I was still mad and he'd slid half the pie across the table toward me without asking. That was when I knew. Not that I was going to marry him—I wasn't that far along yet. But that he was the kind of person who slid pie toward you without asking.

Campus in spring was dogwood trees and bike racks and the sound of someone playing guitar badly from a dorm window. The quad was full of people doing nothing in particular—lying on the grass, reading, texting, living inside the bubble that college was, the one that makes you think the world is a safe and manageable place.

Our shoulders bumped on the narrow sidewalk. He didn't move away. Neither did I.

"You know what the judges said?" He was looking ahead, not at me. "The tall one—the one in the glasses—he asked if I'd thought about scaling. Like, beyond the prototype."

"Have you?"

"Have I thought about it?" He laughed. "Emma. I've thought about nothing else for six months. I've got a spreadsheet. Actually, I've got seven spreadsheets. Jake thinks I need help."

"You do need help."

"From investors. Which is what the tall judge was hinting at. You should've seen his face when I showed the unit cost data. He about fell out of his chair."

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He shifted, muffled it against his leg without looking at it. Kept walking.

"What if you win?" I said.

"When."

"What if you win."

"Then we start. For real. I've already got a name for the company. And a logo." He pulled out his phone to show me, then remembered it had buzzed and checked the notification instead. His face changed for half a second—something I couldn't read. Then he put it away.

"Later," he said.

"What was it?"

"Nothing. Just—later."

He took my hand. His palm was warm and rough—calluses from the woodshop where he'd been building his prototype. The same hands that had tightened that crooked tie backstage, the same hands that had pressed into the podium like it owed him something, the same hands that would one day shake in a delivery room three years from now. But I didn't know any of that yet. I only knew they were warm.

The sidewalk had a crack running through it like a vein, and we stepped over it together. A bike messenger rang his bell and swerved around us. Someone on the lawn was throwing a frisbee badly. The dogwood trees were blooming—white petals scattered on the path like someone had dropped a wedding invitation. Somewhere behind us a door opened and closed. None of it meant anything yet.

All of it meant everything.