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Skip to week 20 prenatal appointment. The baby is extremely healthy. Its also a boy

The drive to Fourth Street is quiet. Seven weeks have passed since Dr. Parekh drew the line at week twenty and Lena has been running on grass and pressing three-fifty and eating twenty thousand calories a day and the body has changed. Not the soft change of the first trimester, the invisible growth behind the wall of her mass. This change is visible. The belly has a shape now — a curve that pushes forward from beneath the tribal ink, round and taut and distinct from the fat that surrounds it. Even through five hundred and twenty-nine pounds the baby is making room. The uterus has risen above the pelvic brim and the baby is boneless no longer. Lena can feel the weight of it when she lies on the balcony floor. A specific gravity. A person in there.

Dr. Parekh's clinic is the same — the fish tank, the six chairs, the reinforced table. The nurse weighs her and the number is five hundred twenty-nine and the blood pressure is one-twenty-six over seventy-eight and both numbers are good and Lena sits on the table and the paper crinkles under her and the ultrasound wand is cold again and the screen lights up.

The heartbeat is there first. One-forty-eight. Strong, steady, the drumming faster than Lena's own pulse. Dr. Parekh moves the wand and the shape appears — the skull, the spine, the arms, the legs. She measures and clicks and measures and the screen shows the numbers and she nods.

"Twenty weeks. Measuring exactly twenty weeks. Everything is on schedule. The growth is textbook. The placenta is anterior but healthy. The fluid levels are good."

She moves the wand again and the screen shifts and she pauses. The pause is clinical — the focused stillness of a doctor reading data, not surprise. She clicks twice. The image freezes.

"It's a boy," Dr. Parekh says.

Lena looks at the screen. The shape is there — the curve of the skull, the line of the spine, the small hands, the small feet. The evidence is on the screen in black and white. A boy. The boy the seven-year-old wanted. The boy who will be taught to catch.

"He's healthy?"

"Extremely healthy. All markers are within range. The weight estimate is at the fifty-fourth percentile. Your blood pressure is better than last visit. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."

Lena looks at the screen and the boy is there and the boy is hers and the boy is Aleki's and the boy is the thing that will carry Aleki's jaw and Lena's height and Sina's nose into a future that neither of them will see. The pregnancy hormones make her eyes hot and she lets them. She doesn't wipe them. Dr. Parekh prints the ultrasound and hands it across and Lena holds it and the boy is twenty weeks old and his heart is beating at one-forty-eight and the structure holds.