Marlin Perkins is visiting the African savanna. He’s talking about springboks, a kind of antelope, smallish, with curved black devil horns. The springboks are notable because they do something called “pronking.” It’s as if they’re drawn into the air by a helium balloon tied to their waist, hopping and then landing, hopping and then landing.

I’m delighted.

I’m turning to laugh with Deck about the silly bounce, the springboks leaping twice their height, back arched and toes pointed, when an obviously pregnant springbok appears onscreen, munching grass as her fellow springboks are popping like corn around her.

“No one knows exactly what events cause springboks to pronk,” Mr. Perkins narrates, “but it’s believed to be a response to a predator.”

My breath catches. I cradle my stomach.

The camera pans to a leopard crouched low in the grass, tongue out, tail flicking.

My hand flies to my mouth. The gravid springbok is oblivious. She’s grazing hungrily, feeding for two. She has no idea she’s being hunted.

“The weakest animals make the best prey: newborns, the elderly, and in this case, the pregnant.”

The large cat stalks toward the clueless springbok, her belly achingly swollen. My heart is thudding. I can’t look away.

“The pregnancy makes the normally agile animal cumbersome and slow. A perfect dinner for a hungry leopard.”

The large cat is nearly on her. I’ve stopped petting Slow Henry. My eyes feel swollen, dry. It’s been too long since I blinked.

The cat leaps. It happens so fast. The predator sinks its wicked teeth deep into the pregnant springbok’s leg, wrenching her to the ground. She bleats in terror, tries to run, but she hasn’t a chance.

I finally rip my gaze away from the screen, tears streaming down my face.

Deck is staring at me.

Icy fingers play across my tender skin.

His expression is unfathomable, but the way he’s positioned, it’s clear he’s been staring at me the whole time.

Watching me watch the pregnant creature get slaughtered.

CHAPTER 20

“Dr. Krause will see you, Miss Harken.”

When my lower back muscles relax, I realize how rigidly I’ve been sitting. Despite not including Deck’s name anywhere on the intake form, I’ve been worried that I’d be called Mrs. Schmidt, here of all places, a spot where I desperately need to be seen as my own person.

Clearly, I was silly to obsess. This is a doctor’s office, a professional place of medicine, a neat, sanitary cube of a building that smells like rubbing alcohol and ointment. They may disapprove of me using my maiden name, but they’ll talk about me behind my back rather than to my face, like proper Minnesotans.

The receptionist, an army bunker of a woman, leads me back. “Please change for the examination. There’s a gown behind the curtain. When you’re finished, push this button to let the doctor know you’re ready.”

The modern exam room is a pleasant surprise. The surfaces gleam. And I’ve never visited a doctor’s office with a button you can push once you have yourself in order. It doesn’t cure the discomfort of covering my nakedness with a flimsy piece of open-backed cloth, of spreading my legs for a strange man, but it helps.

As does Dr. Krause’s appearance when he enters the room moments after I press the button. He’s older, his wire-rimmed glasses two perfect circles beneath a shockingly thick swath of white hair. He’s a smaller man, somewhere between Deck and me in size. He carries a clipboard.

“Miss Harken, I’m Dr. Krause. You’re in a family way?”

“Hello, Dr. Krause.” My tone is formal to match his. “Yes. I believe I’m five months along.”

“How are you feeling?” He removes a pen from behind his right ear, poises it above the clipboard.

“Fine. Great, actually. I was worried about morning sickness, but I haven’t had any.” I recall the panic and nausea I felt the other morning. That doesn’t count, as it started before the pregnancy.

He looks me up and down, his glance clinical. “You’re in good shape. Let’s get the nurse in here for your vitals.”

He pushes the same button I did, and the woman who walked me to the exam room returns. Apparently, she’s more than a secretary. I had thought her a large woman, but she seems to shrink around Dr. Krause.

“Cornelia, you should have weighed and measured Miss Harken before I arrived.”

She doesn’t meet his eyes. “Sorry, Dr. Krause.”

“It’s all right,” I say, though I suspect it isn’t, not in Dr. Krause’s eyes. He’s a popular doctor, exactly as the Mothers told Deck (he’d been booked up through the end of the month, but once I gave the receptionist my name, she said she could squeeze me in today), and he runs a tight ship. Coming to the clinic broke the monotony of not being able to track down Paulie—he wasn’t at the motel when I stopped by yesterday or today—but that’s the only good thing I can say about it. I’m no prude, but I don’t know a single woman who enjoys gynecological exams.

Cornelia leads me to a wall with a measuring tape painted onto it and gently pushes me against it. “Five foot six,” she tells the doctor. She then guides me to the scale. “One hundred twenty-one pounds.”

I smile on the inside. I’ve gained only two pounds in five months.

When the nurse leads me back on the table, she takes my blood pressure and checks my pulse. All of it consumes no more than three minutes, and then she disappears.

“I apologize,” Dr. Krause says. “She’s new.”

“It’s all right,” I repeat. I mean it. I also want him to hurry up and get the examination over with.

But rather than having me lie back and insert my feet into the stirrups, he walks over and feels my forehead, and then my neck. “You’ve been sleeping all right?”

“Yes,” I say, stopping just short of adding the “sir” that wanted to line up like a good soldier at the end. “I’ve been sleeping like a lumberjack after a hard day’s work. I’ve always been a good sleeper.”

Dr. Krause grabs both my hands, turns them palms up, then palms down. He’s so near I can smell his aftershave, soapy and spicy. He runs one warm hand up the outside of my right arm, and then my left.

He stops, studying my upper left arm. “This is an unusual erythema multiforme scar,” he murmurs, almost as an afterthought.

I glance at the spot. “My smallpox vaccination?”

“Yes. Almost like a figure eight.”

I rub it, brushing his hand away. “My mom said I had a bad reaction. My boy—my boyfriend, Deck, has one just like it. We sometimes joke it’s what brought us together.” I consider telling him the stories we made up around our matching scars—that we’d escaped an alternate world where everyone was marked and then found each other in this one, that the scar was proof of our royal lineage, or my favorite, that our ragged figure eights mean we are a fated, perfect match.

I don’t think Dr. Krause would find any of them amusing.

“You two are the same age?”

“Deck’s four years younger.” It’s an embarrassing fact I rarely think about, certainly never mention. He’s so mature for his age.