Viable pregnancy. The words ring in my ears, I barely hear the rest of her sentence as those words echo around my mind. It’s a clinical, terrifying question to pose. Is this cluster of cells going to become life, or will my body potentially fail me? Am I enough to host a baby? If anything is wrong, is it my fault? Will Liam grow to resent me and my body even more if I fail? These are the questions I’ve asked myself since seeing those two lines on the pregnancy test. The computer screen whooshes and warps around the room and the three of us all sit in silence waiting for her to talk again. I don’t know if Jack is waiting on tenterhooks like Liam and me but he is quiet as a mouse.

It takes the doctor a few minutes to find the right spot as she firmly pushes the ultrasound probe against my stomach. It’s uncomfortable against my bladder after I was told to drink as much as I could before the appointment.

“Okay, here we are.” Dr Horne spins the screen around to face me. I hold my phone up so that Liam will also see the little black blob that will be our child. “The baby looks to be the right size for seven weeks, around six millimetres, so still itsy-bitsy, but they are going to start growing faster and faster,” she explains. “Stay very still for me now, you’re still very early so it might not be as easy to find…” She seems to trail off as I follow her instructions.

She squeezes the probe tighter against my belly while she frowns at the screen. Liam is silent on the other end of the call, but I wonder if he’s thinking the same as me. Why is she frowning? Is everything okay? Why do I need to be still?

As I begin to spiral, Dr Horne looks at me with a reassuring smile. Behind her on the screen are waves flowing underneath the image of my uterus, dramatically large and rhythmic. She twists a dial near her lap, and suddenly the waves are connected to a thumping sound. Dun-dun, du-dun. “That’s the heartbeat there,” she tells us.

“That–that’s our baby?” Liam’s voice is quiet coming through the phone, but I hear him over everything else. I turn the phone around so we can see each other, but the sight that I find would knock me off my feet if I were standing. Liam has tears streaming down his reddened cheeks, his lip is quivering. There is so much hope and excitement on his face that he looks as though he was just handed a star plucked right from the sky. “Fuck, Sunshine, that’s our baby.” He says, wiping his hand down his face to clear the tears but just as quickly more fill his eyes.