Two Little Secrets From My Boss

Chapter 153

Daphne’s POV

The ultrasound room is cold. I've been in this room before—for Nina and Lisa's checkups when I was pregnant with them, for the first ultrasound of this pregnancy when everything still felt possible.

But today the cold feels different, deliberate. Like the room itself knows what's coming.

I lie on the examination table, the paper crinkling beneath me, while the technician squeezes gel across my exposed belly.

It's warm from the bottle but goes cold almost instantly, spreading across my skin like something invasive.

Xander's hand wraps around mine, his grip tight enough to hurt. I hold on anyway. We're lifelines for each other now, tethered together against whatever's coming.

The technician moves the wand slowly, methodically, her eyes fixed on the screen beside us.

I try to read the grainy images—there's a head, I can make out that much. Tiny hands that look like they're waving, the rapid flutter of a heartbeat that should reassure me but somehow doesn't.

Twenty-two weeks. Our daughter is twenty-two weeks old, and I've loved her since the moment I knew she existed. Before that, even.

Since the night Xander and I clung to each other on our bedroom floor, fear transformed into desperate need, creating life without meaning to.

The technician's face stays professionally neutral, but I've learned to read people. You don't survive what I've survived without developing that skill.

I watch her eyes track across the screen, watch the way her jaw tightens almost imperceptibly, watch the wand pause in a spot that must mean something.

Then she goes quiet. Not the comfortable quiet of concentration, but something else, something that makes my own heart stutter against my ribs.

"I need to get the doctor." Her voice is too careful, each word selected with precision. "Just want a second opinion on some measurements. Nothing to worry about yet."

The lie sits heavy in the room, thick enough to choke on.

My grip on Xander's hand turns crushing. I watch the technician set down the wand, watch her leave through the door, watch it close behind her with a soft click that sounds like a coffin sealing.

Suddenly the room feels like a tomb—cold and quiet and full of death waiting to be named.

The seconds stretch. Time moves wrong, too slow and too fast simultaneously. Xander's thumb traces circles on my palm, attempting comfort while betraying his own terror.

I can feel his pulse hammering through his fingertips. Or maybe that's mine. Maybe we've become one panicked heartbeat split between two bodies.

"Daphne." His voice cracks on my name.

"Don't." I squeeze his hand harder. "Don't say it's going to be okay. Don't promise me anything."

He closes his mouth. Nods, holds on. When the doctor enters, his face already holds the answer.

I know before he speaks. I know from the set of his shoulders, the careful neutrality of his expression, the way he closes the door like he's sealing us in for the conversation that's about to shatter everything.

He sits, rolls his chair close to the examination table, then pulls up the images on the larger screen mounted on the wall.

Points to shadows and shapes that mean nothing to me—gray patches against black, lines that could be anything or nothing.

"Extensive cardiac abnormalities."

His voice is gentle, practiced, the voice of a man who's delivered this news too many times.

"The heart's left ventricle is significantly underdeveloped. We're seeing multiple structural defects—the aortic valve, the mitral valve, the ascending aorta. It's a condition called hypoplastic left heart syndrome."

The words wash over me. I try to grab onto them, to understand, but they slip through my fingers like water. Hypoplastic. Intervention. Staged surgeries.

He's speaking English, but it sounds like another language, one I was never meant to learn.

"What does that mean?" Xander's voice is steady. How is his voice steady? "For our daughter. What does it mean?"

The doctor takes a breath.

"It means her heart, as it's currently developing, won't be able to sustain life outside the womb without immediate intervention. She'll need surgery within days of birth—the first of three staged procedures over her first few years. Even with treatment, the survival rate is approximately sixty percent."

Sixty percent... The number hangs in the air like a noose.

"Forty percent chance she dies," I hear myself say, my voice sounds distant, like it belongs to someone else.

"Despite everything medicine can do, despite surgery and doctors and fighting. Forty percent chance we lose her anyway."

"Yes. I want to be clear about the realities. The surgeries are extensive, traumatic for an infant. Recovery is long and painful."

He doesn't look away from me. I have to give him credit for that.

"There will be complications. And even if everything goes perfectly, her quality of life will be significantly impacted. She'll never have a normal heart, never be able to do the things other children do without thinking about it."

He pauses, letting that sink in like poison through my veins.

"Given the severity of the defects and the risks involved, we typically recommend considering termination in cases like this. We can discuss the medical protocol, the timeline. We have resources available for grief counseling, support groups for parents who've made this choice."

I hear it all through water. Through the roaring in my ears that sounds like drowning. Through the part of my brain that's already screaming, already shattering, already knowing what I'm going to say before the words form.

The appointment ends. Somehow I'm dressed again, somehow we're walking to the car, somehow Xander is opening the passenger door for me and I'm sliding into the seat.

The world moves around me but I'm not in it, not really. I'm somewhere else, somewhere underwater where sound doesn't reach and nothing feels real.

Xander starts the engine but doesn't put the car in gear. His hands rest on the steering wheel, knuckles white.

"Daphne." His voice is gentle when he asks, soft like he's approaching something wounded.

"If you want to reconsider. If the odds and the surgeries and the suffering are too much. If maybe the doctor's right, and termination is—"

"No." The word comes out sharp, final, cutting through whatever he was going to say next.

I turn to face him. Force myself to meet his eyes. My voice doesn't shake when I tell him.

"We're not giving up, we're not making this choice based on statistics and fear. This is our daughter, Xander. Our baby. And we're going to fight for her with everything we have. Sixty percent is better than zero."

I watch something shift in his face—grief and pride and absolute terror mixing together until I can't tell where one ends and another begins.

His jaw works like he's trying to form words that won't come. Then he nods. Reaches for my hand again, threading our fingers together.

"Okay," he says quietly. "Okay. We fight."

He puts the car in gear. We drive home in silence, but this time it's not empty. It's not the hollow quiet of grief or the suffocating silence of shock.

It's full—full of a terrible, fragile hope that feels like holding glass that could shatter at any moment.

Full of the choice we just made to love our daughter even if it means watching her suffer. Even if it means forty percent odds. Even if it means breaking our own hearts to give hers a chance to beat.

I place my free hand on my belly, feeling the small curve there. "We're going to fight for you," I whisper. "Do you hear me? We're going to fight."

And somewhere deep inside me, I swear I feel her move. Like an answer, a promise. Like hope.