The doctor's appointment in the third week of May produces a piece of information that changes the family diagram's blank circle from anonymous to almost specific.
Not the name, we have not chosen the name, despite Théo's repeated, gentle inquiries about timeline. But the doctor confirms what the early scans suggested and could not yet say definitively: a daughter.
I tell Lucien at the operations table that evening.
He is quiet for a long moment.
He says: a daughter.
I say: yes.
He looks at the territory through the window, the May evening, the long light, the compound settling into its dinner hour around us.
He says: I do not know how to be a father to a daughter.
I say: you do not know how to be a father at all yet. The daughter part is not the unknown thing. All of it is unknown
