I thought the hardest part of losing Daniel before our twins were born was learning to raise them without him. On their first birthday, Carol brought in a box that made me question how much of our last year together I had truly understood.
When I held up the positive test, Daniel stared at it for three full seconds before his face changed.
“Are you serious?”
I was sitting on the kitchen floor because my knees had stopped cooperating.
I laughed and nodded, and Daniel reached down, caught me under the arms, and picked me up as if I weighed nothing.
“We’re having a baby!”
He shouted it so loudly that our neighbor knocked on the wall.
“Keep it down!” a muffled voice called from next door.
Daniel laughed even harder.
“Sorry!” he yelled back. Then he looked at me and whispered, “We’re having a baby.”
For the next three weeks, he treated me as if I were carrying something made of glass.
He carried the groceries, checked ingredients on everything I ate, and downloaded an app that announced the baby’s size each week.
“Blueberry today,” he told me one Tuesday.
“That’s romantic.”
“Next week, raspberry.”
“Even better.”
Then came the ultrasound.
I remember gripping Daniel’s hand while the technician moved the wand across my stomach.
I kept watching her face, trying to decide whether every tiny change in her expression meant something.
Finally, she smiled and turned the screen toward us.
“There are two.”
I blinked.
Daniel leaned forward.
“Two what?”
The technician laughed. “Two babies.”
For one terrifying second, neither of us spoke.
Then, Daniel broke into the biggest grin I had ever seen.
“Twins?”
“Twins,” she confirmed.
He joked the whole drive home.
“Two cribs,” he said, tapping the steering wheel.
“Two car seats.”
“Two college funds.”
“Please stop.”
“And a bigger coffee machine,” he said. “Non-negotiable.”
I laughed so hard that my stomach hurt.
Back then, I believed we were standing at the beginning of a long life.
I thought we had years.
Daniel had always been the calm one.
I worried about everything.
He worried about almost nothing, or at least that was what I believed.
When I started reading articles about twin pregnancies at midnight, he gently took my phone away.
“Bianca, go to sleep.”
“What if they’re premature?”
“We’ll handle it.”
“What if we need a bigger apartment?”
“We’ll handle it.”
“What if we have no idea what we’re doing?”
