The ultrasound room had that kind of silence that makes people stop breathing without realizing it.
Mariana Castillo lay on the examination table, one hand resting on the curve of her belly and the other gripping her husband’s fingers so tightly that Javier would later joke that he still had the marks of his fingernails to prove that that day had indeed been real. The lights were dim ucrm.
The screen glowed in shades of blue and silver. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and warm equipment.
It should have been a happy appointment, one of those normal pregnancy check-ups where a couple goes in talking about the color of the baby’s room and comes out with blurry prints to send via WhatsApp to the whole family.
But the doctor stopped moving.
Mariana noticed it first in the reflection of the monitor. The expression on his face had changed. He was still looking at the screen, yes, but no longer with the casual, practiced attention that doctors usually use. This was something else. It was concentration hardening into disbelief.
Javier cleared his throat.
—Is everything alright, doctor?
The doctor did not respond immediately.
He moved the transducer again, this time more slowly, like a man trying to check if his own eyes are deceiving him.
Mariana’s mouth went dry. All morning she’d been bracing herself for a surprise. Her hormone levels had come back unusually high, and the nurses had already hinted at what that could mean. Twins, maybe. Possibly triplets. After a year of disappointments, even that seemed like too much happiness to trust. But this silence still didn’t feel like happiness. It felt like standing on train tracks, hearing something enormous before you could see it.
“Doctor?” she asked, her voice more fragile than she intended.
Finally, he exhaled.
—Count five.
For a second, Mariana thought she had misheard.
Five what?
Five measurements? Five sacks? Five heartbeats?
Javier leaned forward so fast that the chair scraped against the floor.
—Five babies?
The doctor nodded once, still staring at the screen.
—That’s what I’m seeing.
