“Have you confirmed that you’re pregnant?” she asks, flipping through my forms.

“Yeah,” I say, and Robert smiles. Ethan bought every kind of pee stick the drugstore had. He and Robert stood outside the bathroom cheering every time I slipped another positive one through the huge gap under the door. They were all positive.

She pulls my gown up and the drape down. “So, how far along are we?”

“About a month?” I say.

She grabs a calendar off the desk and shows it to us. Robert points to the day. The bar. Our first time. “I think it had to be then,” he says.

“When was your last period?” she asks, and I turn beet red.

I never keep track. “I don’t know,” I say, and feel like an idiot. I look far off and pretend I’m counting out days, but I can’t remember anything. I shake my head.

“Okay,” she says, “well, we’ll take a look and see what your baby can tell us today.” She grabs a bottle that looks like the kind you put ketchup or mustard in, but it’s white, not red or yellow. She holds it over my belly, smacks the bottom of it, and squirts cold blue jelly all over. It’s gross. I don’t like the way that being pregnant seems to make everything about you fair game—your pee, your belly, your period.

“It might be too early for a heartbeat. Don’t worry if we don’t hear one,” she says.

She holds this flat wand thing against my stomach. It doesn’t hurt, but when she presses harder and pushes it around, it makes me queasy.

Then we hear it. The heartbeat. Loud, thumping static. Alien communications. Like our baby is saying hello to us. And then I’m crying. Robert is too. Like that thumping is the most beautiful sound we’ve ever heard.

We look at the screen, where she’s pointing, “See, that’s your baby!” she says, but it looks like TV reception in a snowstorm. So we focus on the sound. Robert’s hand squeezes mine ever so slightly in time with the beat. I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it. I don’t want it to stop, but then Dr. Katim takes the wand off my stomach and says, “Alright, Daddy, I’m going to have you step out to the waiting room now, while Mom and I do some girl stuff.”