Chapter Nine
1126 Words
~Selene’s POV~
The search takes most of the morning.
I sit at the small table with my phone and the notepad Miriam has left beside the kettle, and I work through it methodically — not the way someone searches in desperation, but the way someone builds a list. High-risk obstetric specialist. Supernatural pregnancy experience. Silvermere and within reasonable distance. I write down four names before I start eliminating. One is retired. One has a waiting list measured in months. One has a clinic website that hasn't been updated since before I was married, which tells me something, though I couldn't say precisely what.
The fourth is Dr. Amara Osei.
Her practice is listed under a quiet street in the city's northern quarter. The clinic's registration is current. Her credentials include a subspecialty notation in supernatural maternal care that the other three do not. There are no photographs on the website, no curated testimonials. Just the qualifications and the address and a phone number.
I call at half past nine.
The appointment is at two.
---
I dress the same way I always dress when I need to be taken seriously by someone who does not yet know me: with precision and without ornamentation. Dark trousers. A grey blouse that does not announce itself. My coat, which is good quality and well-fitted and says what I need it to say without requiring me to say anything.
The velvet box stays on the nightstand.
This is the first time since the morning after the rejection ceremony that I have left it behind deliberately, rather than by necessity, and I note this fact the way Dr. Noel has trained me to note things without judgment, without elaboration. I note it and I close the bedroom door and I take the stairs down to the street.
---
The clinic occupies the ground floor of a narrow building that sits between a bookshop and a dry cleaner. The door is plain. The nameplate beside it reads A. Osei, Specialist Maternal Care in small, unembellished letters.
I go in.
The waiting room is warm and clean and smells of nothing in particular, which is a deliberate choice — I recognize it as such. Scent sensitivity in early pregnancy is documented. Whoever designed this space understood that.
I sit and wait and do not look at my phone.
---
Dr. Amara Osei is tall. She has the particular stillness of someone who conserves movement for when it is needed, and she carries a clipboard without looking at it, which means the clipboard is more habit than necessity. She reads a file before she reads a face, but she reads the face after.
She reads mine.
"Ms. Ashford," she says. "Come through."
Her office is spare. Two chairs, a desk, an examination table against the far wall. She sits across from me and opens the file — the summary I was asked to bring, Dr. Noel's notes, which I had requested forwarded ahead of the appointment — and she reads it in silence for two full minutes.
I do not fill the silence.
She looks up.
"Twin gestation, currently fifteen weeks by your dates, high-risk classification. Iron deficiency, elevated cortisol markers at last assessment." She sets the file flat on the desk. "You've been supplementing?"
"Since week ten."
"Sleep?"
"Variable."
She writes something. "Appetite?"
"Adequate."
She looks at me again — the same unhurried reading of a face she performed in the doorway. "The previous physician notes a bond severance event. Approximately four to five weeks prior to your current gestational week."
I hold her gaze. "Yes."
"Any complications you've observed since?"
"The cortisol elevation. Some residual joint ache, resolved over the first three weeks. No bleeding. No cramping."
She writes again. Then she sets the pen down.
"I'll need to do an assessment today if you're agreeable. Confirm the gestational age, check the heartbeats, review your current iron levels with a new draw."
"That's what I'm here for," I say.
She almost smiles. It is very small, and it is in her eyes, not her mouth, and I find that I trust it precisely because it costs something.
---
The examination table is cold through the paper covering. I lie back and look at the ceiling and Amara works with quiet efficiency — the probe, the screen angled so I can see it, her eyes moving between the image and her notes with the focused attention of someone doing the one thing they are very good at.
Two heartbeats.
I hear them before I see them — that rapid, percussive sound, doubled, slightly offset in rhythm.
I keep my face still.
"Both strong," she says, without inflection. "Positioning is good for the gestational stage. I'm satisfied with fetal development." She adjusts the probe slightly, and the image shifts. "This one—" she tilts her head, "—has been moving during the assessment. The second has not."
I look at the screen.
"That's consistent," I say, before I have quite decided to say it.
She glances at me.
"The active one," I clarify, which is not more explanation, really, but she accepts it.
She does not ask me who the father is.
I am aware of this, the way you are aware of a door that remains closed in a house where other doors have been opened. The notes in front of her have a blank in that field. She has looked at it. She has said nothing about it, not a question, not a pause, not the fractional shift of expression that would tell me she is calculating something. She has simply moved forward.
She prints the scan images and hands them to me when I am sitting up.
"I'd like to see you every two weeks while your iron stabilizes. Once we have two consistent good readings, we can move to three-weekly." She returns to her desk and writes the prescription without theatre. "Iron infusion, if you're not absorbing the oral supplements adequately — we'll check your levels first. In the meantime, double the dose with Vitamin C, away from calcium."
I fold the scan images into my coat pocket.
She slides the prescription across the desk.
I take it. Stand. Button my coat.
"Thank you," I say.
"Two weeks," she says. "Not three."
I nod.
---
Outside, the street is ordinary. People moving past with their ordinary purposes, the city conducting itself without reference to me.
I walk back toward the flat with the prescription in one pocket and the scan images in the other, and the afternoon light falls on a city that does not know my name yet.
She did not ask who the father was. I was grateful for that more than I could have said.
- Writer
