Released (Caged 3)

“All ready?” I asked. I could hear the nervousness in my voice.

“I am,” Tria said. “Are you?”

I could only nod. Any words would have given my anxiety away.

Tria shivered and complained about the cold goop the nurse smeared over her belly, but as soon as the nurse moved onto the next step and images began to appear on the monitor next to her, she stopped talking altogether and just stared at the screen.

“What is that?” she asked in amazement.

“That would be your baby’s heart beating,” the nurse said. She smiled and pointed out the head and stomach, the arms, and the legs. “Did you want to know the sex?”

“Yes,” we replied in unison.

The nurse chuckled, moved the magic wand around Tria’s stomach again, and then proclaimed we were going to have a daughter. I had no idea how she could figure that shit out—I couldn’t tell the head from the foot.

“Fuck me,” I muttered. “She was right!”

“I thought she would be,” Tria said. “She was just too confident about it.”

“She was once confident that the wino across the street was Hitler,” I informed Tria. “I wasn’t about to take her word for that, either, though the dude did have one of those fucked up mustaches.”

Tria giggled, and the nurse printed off a few pictures of the baby.

“What are we going to name her?” Tria asked as we climbed into the back of the Rolls. She hadn’t stopped staring at the picture, and I had to hold her hand so she wouldn’t trip over anything.

“I have no fucking idea,” I said.

“Me either.”

“Something will come to us,” I assured her.

Tria realized she had been impolite, and quickly shifted toward the driver’s seat and showed Damon the pictures.

“It’s amazing what they can do these days,” he said.

“Do you have children?” Tria asked.

“I have a grown daughter,” he told her. “She used to babysit Liam when he was young. She has two children of her own now. I remember when she came home with similar pictures.”

“I think she looks like you,” Tria said as she held the image up to the window.

“You are so full of shit,” I said.

“I mean it,” Tria insisted. “She has your bone structure.”

I rolled my eyes, smiled, and pulled my wife close to me as Damon drove away.

Though I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at in the grainy black and white images, I couldn’t help but glance at them over and over again as we drove across the city. At one point, I reached over and wiped a tear from the corner of Tria’s eye.

“She’s going to be beautiful,” Tria whispered.

I was never one to argue with a woman, and I wasn’t going to start now.

Chapter 15—Change the Scenery

“There are two bedrooms, a bathroom with a tub and shower, and an eat-in kitchen.”

The landlord of the small rental house just five blocks from campus was thrilled to death a family was looking to move in instead of a group of students, who were a lot more likely to trash the place. It was just a small house in a row of other small houses, painted light yellow with brown shutters. There was a nice-sized porch with a swing, which Tria beamed at before we even walked inside.