Harry reacted first, leaping to his feet after a brief moment of stunned silence. “Yeah!” he shouted, both fists hammering at the air. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” He turned to Hannah, snatching her hands and raising them so high she worried he’d yank her off the exam table and send her crashing through the plaster of the ceiling. She looked at him and was startled to see tears streaming down his face. “Hannah,” he said. “Hannah.”

Nia allowed them another long look at their child—still a formless, minute blob, but nonetheless breathtaking—and removed the ultrasound probe. She stepped back, giving Harry a wide berth. Despite his military bearing, Harry’d never been one to espouse a faux masculinity: he was plenty emotional. Love bubbled out of him with all the ardor of a teenage girl. He controlled his anger well, but when he found something amusing, he let go into full-on, head-tipped-back, openmouthed howling. His laughter could shake a concrete foundation.

But Hannah had never before seen him cry.

“Hannah,” he said again, his elation spent. The years of failure escaped him in one fell swoop. At the foreign sound of him crying, she couldn’t help it; she couldn’t hold it in either. She sat up and scooted over to him, tilting her face up as he tilted his down, their cheeks colliding. She strained upward to press her face into his, savoring the rough rasp of his skin above his mask even as she tried to dry his face with her free hand. He grasped the back of her head, his shoulders shaking. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to wail aloud with joy and a weird, terrified, brand-new kind of grief. Now they had so much more to lose.

All she could do was close her eyes, trying to bring her breath under control.

Harry stroked her hair, his face still pressed to hers. “We’re going to have a baby, my love,” he whispered.

—

EVENTUALLY THEY CALMED down enough to talk. No pregnancy was without risk, of course, especially now, with a pandemic raging toward them with all the subtlety of a forest fire. Hannah watched Nia’s face as she spoke but could not force herself to focus on the words. Harry didn’t appear to be faring any better in the concentration department. He swiped at his eyes and fluttered his hands toward his face like somebody’s old grandma, every now and then pausing to blow out a long, shuddery breath.

Nia finished up and he offered her a handshake. “You’re the greatest, Nia.”

“I’m so pleased, Harry. This is a blessed moment.”

Harry’s eyes crinkled up as he grinned. “I bawled like a little kid.”

“You’re entitled to cry all you want,” said Nia. Her eyelashes batted, dislodging a suspicious wetness of their own. “Plus, we love happy tears around here.”