Month 3-4

It was nearly 3 am when Michael finally slipped into bed, curling into the warmth of Sara with a soft sigh. She'd been asleep for hours, and he didn't want to wake her, but couldn't stop himself from laying one hand lightly over the thin cotton of her Northwestern t-shirt to rest it gently over her abdomen. Pregnant. God, he still couldn't quite believe it.

"Is everyone gone?" she asked sleepily, eyes closed.

Michael gave himself a mental rebuke. He shouldn't have disturbed her. "All but Linc. He's crashing on the couch."

"Give him the guest room," she murmured.

"He doesn't care. It's fine." He kept his voice a low whisper. Maybe she could fall back asleep. Instead, she rolled over toward him, tucking her face into the crook of his arm. He ran a hand over her head, trailing his fingers through her hair. "I love you," he told her.

He felt her smile. "Are you happy? About…before?"

He let his palm rub a soft circle across her belly. It felt akin to coaxing a genie out of a lamp. "You have no idea how happy," he told her. He already had his first two wishes granted. Who would this third one turn out to be? He felt her smile again, her lips brushing his bicep. He turned his head to try to see her in the dark, but her face was still hidden and he didn't want to uproot her from his arm. "What about you?" he forced himself to ask, his heart suddenly in his throat. "Are you good with this? Truly?" She'd talked big when she'd been willing to throw caution to the wind their first weeks together, but what if…

"So good," she whispered, but she shifted to lay her head on the pillow to face him. "I'm nervous, too, though."

He stroked her upturned cheek with the pad of his thumb. "Why?"

"I know how hard it can be, Michael."

"You won't have to do it alone this time." They were still whispering, but his voice cracked like glass now.

She reached for his hand that still lay on her stomach, and threaded her fingers through his. She squeezed. "I know."

She remained quiet after that for several minutes, and Michael began to wonder if she'd fallen back asleep. "Sara?" he whispered experimentally.

"Hmm?"

"How long have you known?"

"For sure? Just a few weeks."

He bit back a grumble at this, but honestly, he was only annoyed with himself: how had he not noticed how tired she'd been? And while she'd been sick to her stomach, he'd bickered with her about holiday lights. As he mentally berated himself, she silently guided his hand back against her abdomen, laying her own on top of his.

"I'm pretty certain I'm eight weeks along," she told him.

Eight. He did the math in his head swiftly. "Due at the end of August, then?"

"Or early September. I'll find an OB, make an appointment, and we'll figure it out for sure…maybe tomorrow…." She trailed off, eyes closing again.

He kissed her temple. "Go to sleep."

She was out cold in seconds.


Now that Michael knew what to look for, Sara's condition was painfully obvious to him. She fell asleep before Mike most nights, dosing on the couch or jerking herself awake mid-sentence in his bedtime story, and she moved very tenderly in the mornings, attempting only to nibble on graham crackers between tiny sips of water. When Michael made his 'famous' (Mike's words) scrambled eggs she usually loved so much, she pivoted on the spot, sprinting from the kitchen for the bathroom. In fact, she retreated just as quickly from nearly any cooking smell, from meat grilling to coffee brewing.

"What can you eat?" Michael asked her a bit desperately, after she'd shook her head at yogurt, cereal, granola, oatmeal, peanut butter, and toast one morning. She just shrugged.

"Bananas," Lincoln supplied the next day, when Michael called him to share their news. "God, just absolute pounds of bananas. All she ate for weeks."

"Really?" Sara said, when Michael shared this memory with her later. "How strange."

"You don't remember that?"

She pursed her lips, leaning against the kitchen counter (sink and stove completely scrubbed clean of food smells), then exhaled heavily. "Vaguely. Poor Lincoln," she said.

She looked distressed, and if there was one thing Michael was not going to allow during this pregnancy, it was distress. "He didn't mind, Sara."

She stared across the room blankly. Michael could tell she was very far away from him, in her mind. "I was just…God. Useless. He got me out of Miami, he got me back to Panama. He apparently fed me bananas, while I just…" She closed her eyes. "Just lay there, curled in a ball."

"He didn't mind helping," Michael managed again. He'd asked him to. He'd made him promise. Sara knew this, but Michael figured she didn't need to be reminded of that right now.

"He had his own pain," she challenged plaintively. "And I didn't care, Michael. I didn't care." Her voice cracked. "I never apologized to him for that."

He put his arms around her, and held her close to him until she loosened her hold on the counter and embraced him back with another sad sigh. "Do you know what he says about you, from that time? And from after, when Mike was born? Because I talk to him, you know. He tells me things."

She tensed again, but she needn't have. "I can imagine," she said darkly.

"He says you were exactly as he'd expected you to be, just as I'd expect: fierce, strong, smart, logical, nurturing, loving — "

"Michael —"

"What he has not said, not once, is that you were useless, or selfish, or anything else you're going on about. And maybe you haven't noticed this, but my brother tells it like it is. I think he missed a few lessons on tact."

She exhaled hard, almost laughing, and he held her tighter, until her head came to rest on his shoulder. He nudged her. "Don't fall asleep on me," he teased, and she jabbed him in the arm.

"That part will get better soon," she promised. He kissed her forehead, extracting himself to reach for the car keys on the counter. "Where are you going?"

He raised one eyebrow at her. "I'm getting bananas, of course. Cases of bananas."


"It's normal for me," Sara insisted to her new obstetrician. "Nothing to worry about."

"And they say doctors don't make the best patients," Michael quipped.

Dr. Coleson quirked a smile in his direction, but addressed Sara again while consulting the chart that had followed her from Panama to the States. "But you had morning sickness this severe during your first pregnancy, too?"

She looked levelly at him, determined to speak candidly, whether she felt Michael really needed to hear all this or not. It couldn't be helped; she could no more banish him from this exam room than she could keep her breakfast down. And she wanted a good relationship with Dr. Coleson, who she'd picked rather carefully. "Yes," she said, "the nausea was bad then, too."

"From when, to when?"

She tried to think back, without really thinking back. Most of that time still remained a black abyss she'd rather not stumble into, even with Lincoln helping to fill in the gaps. "About week 6-14 or so?"

Dr. Coleson kept his face professionally passive, but she saw the hint of the frown around his mouth. "That long, hmm?" He flipped through her chart. "And weight loss for quite a while, too. Also high blood pressure during your first and second trimesters."

"I was under fairly significant stress." She carefully avoided looking at Michael, who she assumed was frowning at this understatement. She'd been in Miami-Dade part of that time, and then of course, there had been its aftermath. She'd never known, even after her father died, how physical grief could be. "Anyway, it's hard to gain weight when you can't keep anything down."

"Did you try Diclegis?"

"I didn't want to take anything." It had felt like a slippery slope, with that abyss so close. She chanced a glance at Michael, whose expression was carefully guarded. She'd told him this would be hard in ways he hadn't expected. She explained to him, "it's a delayed release pill, helps with nausea. Sometimes."

"Would you consider taking something now?" the OB asked. Michael looked at her hopefully.

"Maybe just ginger root," she hedged. "And vitamin B6?"

"Vitamins only help if they stay in your stomach," Michael pointed out. "Plus, I hate seeing you so miserable."

"We can give it a few weeks," her doctor offered. "Try the natural remedies for the time being. But I want to change something up if you haven't gained any weight by the end of your first trimester. Agreed?"

Michael and Sara both nodded reluctantly, for opposite reasons.

Dr. Coleson rose from his swivel chair, as though dusting his hands of this issue. "Alright. With that settled, let's examine you, Sara." He turned to don his gloves while she smoothed the flimsy paper exam smock over her stomach. "You know the drill…heels in the stirrups, please. Dad can stay, or step out, up to you."

He said this to Sara, but Michael answered swiftly, "I'm here for everything."

Sara smiled. "It's fine. Whatever he wants."

She lay back as the doctor readied his equipment and warmed his hands before saying, "You'll feel just a little discomfort now." She stared up at the ceiling, releasing a deep breath slowly as his fingers followed the invasive metal speculum into her body. Michael blinked, his mouth falling open slightly, and the distraction of his expression proved useful. It occurred to Sara that he'd probably never been present for a gynecological exam before.

"It'll be over before you know it," she told Michael with a wry smile, earning her a chuckle from Dr. Coleson.

"Uh huh. Okay." He stared at her face, while she tried to pass for relaxed as a man she'd just met palpated her cervix.

"Alright, all done," Coleson announced, and she scooted back on the exam table to sit up into a slightly more dignified position. "Looking good, measuring at eight weeks on the nose, just as you thought." The doctor looked amused to have to admit to Sara's accuracy. "I'll see you both in about a month, at which time you'll have moved the needle on that weight scale, right?" Michael nodded solemnly, as though he could ensure this happened by will alone.

Sara just sighed. "See you four weeks."


They sat Mike down with them in the living room after he'd finished his homework one weeknight at the end of January. Sara would be showing soon, and besides, the kid didn't miss a thing. Michael wanted this news to come straight from them, not second-hand or deduced by his impressive observational skills. Sara tucked Mike against her chest, his back to her front, and he settled against her casually. It was a familiar snuggle-thing the two of them did that always made Michael's heart ache in a painfully happy way.

"We have something we want to tell you," Sara said, her cheek at his ear.

She didn't say a 'surprise'; Michael knew Mike didn't like surprises much. "What?" he asked. "Are we going to Baja again?"

"I think we should definitely go to Baja again sometime," Michael agreed, "but that's not what we want to tell you." He hesitated, suddenly unsure how to go on.

Sara said, "I think maybe you've noticed how I haven't been feeling all that great lately?" Michael saw Mike's jaw tense. His fingers, previously dancing up Sara's arms, stilled.

"Yes." He turned to study Sara, his face alarmed.

"I'm fine, Mike," she told him swiftly. "I'm going to be perfectly fine, but I don't feel too well right now, because, uh…" She cleared her throat. "I'm going to have a baby."

She blushed slightly, which Michael found unexpected and endearing. Mike, however, just stared at her like this was the strangest thing he'd ever heard. Michael held his breath. After he'd processed this, Mike would want answers on probably a variety of subtopics. But when he finally found his voice, he asked perhaps the only question Michael hadn't been expecting. "Why?"

Sara hadn't expected this one, either. Before talking to Mike, the two of them had tried to prepare themselves for his curiosity: 'How' they were prepared to skate around. 'When' they were ready to answer. 'Who' they were looking forward to speculating about…maybe a brother, maybe a sister. But 'why'? "Well, Mike," Sara stammered, "because I…um…your father and I love each other, you know that, and…"

"No, I mean, why now, when you told me definitely no before."

She blinked. "What?"

"Before," Mike repeated. "When Carter's mom had a baby and he got a little brother and I said…," he turned to draw Michael into this exchange, as though suddenly remembering he had to catch him up to speed, "I said, I want a baby brother, too, and you…" he turned back to direct a serious gaze on Sara, "said no. That you didn't want any other baby after me."

"Uh…well that was because…um…" She flung a look at Michael, and yes, he could fill in the blanks she was shooting at him, but what was he supposed to say? Your mom didn't want any baby but mine? Just saying it in his head made his blood instantly heat as his eyes locked with hers, dark and equally heated on his own. He struggled to pull back from the sudden energy swimming between them. That, he wanted to say, is why, Mike. And how.

He heard Sara end lamely, "I can't believe you remember that, Mike." Truly, their son's excellent recall wasn't terribly convenient at the moment.

Michael tried, "The thing is, there are right times for people to have babies, and wrong times. Before, when I wasn't back yet, wasn't the right time."

Mike considered this logic, studying Michael almost sternly. "Do you want a baby now, too?"

"With your mom, yes." He decided he'd better not look at her again. "Very much."

"Because then you'll be this baby's dad?" Slowly, it dawned on Michael where this line of questioning might lead, and he felt a swift wave of trepidation.

"Yes, just like I'm your dad." He swallowed. Please don't go where I think you're going, Mike.

Mike went there. "But then why do you need another baby when you just got me?" His chin quivered as Michael felt the floor drop out beneath him. His entire body felt doused in ice water, like he'd just been the unlucky victim of a dunk tank.

"Mike, baby," Sara objected.

But Michael couldn't let her field this for him. It felt vitally important that he answer his son. "Michael?" he said solemnly, and the invocation of his full name worked. Mike's eyes flicked immediately back from Sara to him. Michael took Mike's small face in both hands, sandwiching his cheeks gently with his palms. He spoke to him with deliberate care. "You are the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me. I wake up every day scarcely believing I actually get to be your dad. It feels like the most wonderful dream, one I get to have again every night." Mike's chin quivered again, like maybe he still wanted to cry but in a different way. "And I just keep thinking, if Mike is this amazing, this smart and this special, probably his brother or his sister will be…I don't know…at least half as good? What do you think?" He gave Mike this statistical challenge with a hint of a smile.

Mike's cheeks lifted under Michael's fingertips in a quick, incredulous laugh, and he released his face. "Dad! C'mon. At least half as good, but probably more. Probably really good, I think!"

Michael exhaled, relief sluicing through him. "With you as a brother? Definitely."

"Really, really good! Maybe great. A great baby." Mike spun to Sara, looked at her in surprise, and patted her face. "Don't cry, Mom. It's going to be a great baby!"

Sara looked like she couldn't decide between kissing Michael hard and shaking him for such a near disaster. Impulsively, he pulled her to him and pressed his mouth to hers, swallowing her rise of protest at such a display, then laughing at Mike's 'eww!' Out of his peripheral vision, he saw his son try to make a leap for the floor, and snagged him in one long arm, sweeping him back to land on his lap. He pulled both Sara and Mike into a tangled, squirmy hug. "Let's have a really, really great baby," he told them both, then laughed at Mike's muffled cheer of agreement.


Once Mike was on board, the questions Michael had been anticipating came hard and fast. When would the baby be here? Where was it now? Why couldn't he see it in Mom's stomach?

"Correct anatomical terms only, please," Sara had insisted, overhearing this one.

Okay, why couldn't he see it in Mom's uterus? When would he see it? And how did it get in there in the first place?

"Uh, Dr. Mom with the 'correct anatomical terms' can answer that one," Michael told Mike while packing his lunch.

"That's okay. I'll just ask Maddy. She says she knows."

Nope. "Never mind, I'll explain," Michael amended swiftly. He thought fast. "Uh, so you know how you learned about DNA in Mr. House's class, with the tree root? Well, men have DNA and women do too, and when they combine, it can make a new person. It's just chemistry, Mike, simple as that." There. Easy. He felt quite proud of himself for navigating this so well.

"But how does it combine? Isn't the DNA in your body?"

Shit. I give up. Just ask Maddy. "What?" Michael said aloud, to buy time.

It worked. The timer beeped on Mike's watch, signaling car pool pick-up. The watch had been Michael's idea, to ensure a lack of tardies, and he now decided to congratulate himself a second time. "It's okay! I'll ask you later," Mike called from the front hall.

Yes. Much later, please.

Alone in the house, he went to his computer to start work, but instead found himself Googling, 'how to explain reproduction to your child'. The only advice for parents of first graders involved either storks or vague religious explanations, or alarmingly, a combination of both, and Michael didn't see Mike buying either explanation, especially given that storks were not native to upstate New York. On an impulse, he called Lincoln. "Who told you where babies come from?" he asked him without preamble.

"Ah Jesus, Mike. Did you miss that whole talk? Because I did my best, but c'mon. You were a smart kid. I thought you'd catch on when I knocked up Lisa."

"I'm serious Linc. What do I say to Mike?"

There was silence on the line for a long moment. "Nothing, dumbass. He's six."

"With Sara pregnant, he's asking questions."

"Then you make shit up."

His brother's succinct answer to his problem was so…so…Linc-like, Michael felt his anxiety dissolve into a melted puddle. Why did he always overthink everything? "Thanks, man," he laughed. "That's exactly what I needed to hear."

Later that evening, Mike observed Sara's careful avoidance of the night's dinner menu. "I think just some fruit," she said, about as cheerfully as she could.

"You need to eat real food, Mom, for our baby," he chastised.

Michael watched her draw up all the patience she had left in her after a long day of examinations and hospital rounds. "Fruit is real food, Mike."

"But we're trying to have a really great baby, Mom." He tucked into his own chicken and vegetables as though leading by example.

Michael couldn't help but smile. "We are doing our part," he couldn't resist teasing.

Sara hovered in the living room like the dining room contained biohazards instead of sustainably procured, carefully prepared, organic food. "Well, can you tell this great baby to take it a bit easier on me?"

Mike thought about this. "Carter's big brother says there was this TV show with a zombie baby who killed its mother…Or maybe zombies ate the mother. I don't know but it was so gross. So it could be worse. You could have that."

"That sounds ridiculous," Michael said firmly.

"I haven't ruled it out," Sara said testily.

"Our baby is awesome," Mike declared again.

"Yes, everything is awesome," Sara said absently, staring down an apple like it might bite her instead of the other way around. For some reason Michael didn't understand, this statement made Mike laugh, and add in a burst of song, "Everything is cool when you're part of a team. Right, Dad?" he added, still giggling.

Michael looked at him in confusion, and Mike gave him one of his patented, Dad! looks. This finally made Sara smile. "Your father is a little out-of-date on his pop culture kid movie references."

This turned Mike on a new tangent. He loved it when he had knowledge or stories to impart to Michael, instead of the other way around. "After dinner, we should watch the LEGO Movie, or, maybe Guardians of the Galaxy."

Sara toyed with the apple some more. "Which Guardians movie?"

"Both, Mom." Before she could tell him there wasn't time for so many hours in front of the TV, he added, "'Cause in the second one, there's a dad who comes back!" His face fell a bit. "But he's evil. Oh! But there's a baby! Baby Groot!" He looked at Michael, who felt like Mike had begun talking in a foreign language. "Now that's an awesome baby."


At Sara's 12 week appointment, she'd managed to gain two hard-won pounds, which didn't seem like enough to Michael, but won her favor with Dr. Coleson. "Must have been Lincoln's banana tip," she quipped, her relief at avoiding a prescription for the anti-nausea meds obvious. Sometimes, Michael chastised himself, he let himself forget how seriously Sara took her sobriety. The pills would have in no way compromised that, as far as he was concerned, but clearly, she saw it differently.

By 14 weeks, she'd returned to the dinner table, the tightness around her jaw as she constantly fought queasiness mercifully absent. She was showing now, provided you knew what to look for, and Michael looked often, his eye drawn to the slight rise of her belly under loose shirts and tunics and sweatshirts. She'd need to shop for maturity clothes soon. He'd never seen her more pregnant than this, had never seen her this pregnant, and it gave him a thrill of undiluted euphoria every time he caught sight of the new curves of her body.

"I'll do the dishes," she offered one night after eating an actual, full meal, and then he knew the nausea really was gone.

"Thank you," he acknowledged, with a kiss to the back of her neck, thinking he'd use the time to check email in the office, but instead, he found himself coming up behind her at the sink, wrapping his arms around her, unable to resist palming the swell of her stomach under her blouse. She chuckled softly, her hands still outstretched to drip into the sink.

"I'm so glad your appetite is back," he said, his chin on her shoulder.

She leaned back against him until the soft curve of her backside pressed into his groin. Mmm. Turning her head upward, she placed a slow kiss against the crook of his neck. "Other things are back, too," she told him.

"Well, that's interesting," he noted. He slid his hands to her hips and drew her against him more firmly. It had been awhile. Not that he minded, not that he'd complain, but…still.

He waited very patiently through homework time, bath time, reading time, and bedtime for Mike, and even then, he told himself: maybe not, let her lead. After all, she got tired so fast, so easily. But after turning out Mike's light, she appeared in the doorway of the office. "Maybe we can turn in early, if you're not too busy?"

He really shouldn't get his hopes up. "Are you tired?"

"Not yet."

The room was dim, but even in the weak light of the computer monitor, he knew that glance she was shooting him. Sexual hunger was a very good look on his wife. He scrambled out of his chair. "After you."

In their bed, her body felt new. Michael didn't say this; it would sound ridiculous, and maybe even cause Sara to shed this newfound enthusiasm he was currently so enjoying, but it was true. He marveled at her breasts: heavier, fuller, his palm no longer able to completely cup them. Lower, the soft swell of her abdomen, the size of a small cantaloupe under his touch, sent an alarming portion of his blood southward. Was it wrong, that her pregnant state turned him on so much? And if so, he thought with a wry smile against her belly, did he want to be right?

Sara was turned on too…electrically so. He could feel the tension humming off her skin, how badly she wanted him, and this awareness set what blood remained in the rest of his veins on fire. God, how did she do it? "You will never understand what you do to me, Sara," he growled at her, and she writhed in his arms, caught somewhere along their hazy spectrum of sexual frustration and satisfaction.

"I think I have an idea," she gasped.

After teasing both of them about as much as they could bear, he slid a hand below her stomach and between her legs, and his eyes widened in surprise. Another new development: he'd never felt her so wet. Ever. This brought another groan to his throat and another hard, almost violent swell of blood to his groin, and he stroked two fingers into her experimentally. She shuddered with pleasure. The thought of how she'd feel right now, if he entered her, nearly ended everything right then and there.

Think about anything else, anything, anything, anything at all, he ordered himself as he added a third finger, followed by the pad of his thumb at her moan of encouragement. ANYTHING AT ALL. He curled his fingers the way he knew she liked, stroking her, her body hot and slick and swollen, until, much more quickly than he'd anticipated, she ground into his hand with a soft cry. His fingers still deep inside her, he felt the tremor of her orgasm for what seemed like an exquisitely long time.

He kissed her belly, which had grown interestingly rigid, while she caught her breath, then he slid up her body to whisper, "Think you can do that again for me?"

She nodded mutely, and he rolled onto her — she liked it like this, liked him on top — and then he suddenly stopped, lifting his weight abruptly off her with his elbows. He should probably…

Sara tugged him back down. "Michael, it's fine. You're good."

"I think I should…" he shifted off her again, acutely aware of the rise of her stomach. "Um, maybe just…" He could please her again with his hands, or his mouth. He didn't need to…well, he desperately needed to, but he could deny himself. He knew he could.

"Michael," she growled. "Please trust me. I'm fine. Baby's fine. Please."

She must have seen that he'd gone frozen in indecision, because she took matters into her own hands, wrapping her legs around him and rolling them both over to straddle him. Before he could form any opinion on this move other than yessss, she'd guided him into her, and he was lost. She was still so wet, it was actually hard for her to move against him with any reliable rhythm, and when she could tell he was too far gone to argue, she rolled him partway back on top of her, allowing him to rock into her from the side. She was right: it was so good this way, he nearly forgot to breathe, panting in hard gasps against her shoulder. He braced against her knee to thrust into her the way he knew she needed, and very quickly, he felt her come again, the warmth of her body tightening around him in a long quaking, pulsing spasm.

He'd like to think he was the kind of man who could last long enough to give her a third one of these, but there was no riding this out. He came in her on a rough groan that he knew was far too loud, but couldn't hold back. She muffled his mouth with hers, smiling into his lips. "Shhh," she laughed.

They lay tangled together for a moment, stilling while they listened for any sign that they'd woken Mike, then, when all remained quiet outside their door, Michael settled Sara against his chest, brushing her hair back from her damp forehead. "That was kind of incredible," he whispered.

He felt her smile against him. "I'd heard pregnancy orgasms could be amazing…something about the extra hormones. But I had no idea."

He trailed his fingers across her bare shoulder and arm. "It wasn't like that the first time?" he asked absently. Everything else had been so similar: the nausea, the fatigue.

She lifted her head slightly to look at him. "I didn't have the opportunity to learn," she pointed out. "I'm guessing you'll be glad to know this was one thing your brother did not do for me, during Mike's pregnancy."

Michael shuddered. "Jesus, Sara. Don't even joke like that." She laughed at the look on his face.

"And I have to admit," she added coyly, "my hands aren't as talented as yours." She bravely let him watch her face turn pink.

"Jesus," he muttered again roughly, his groin already tightening anew. He pulled her closer, his hand brushing her bare behind. Maybe she'd get that third orgasm tonight after all.


They waited way too long to bring up Sara's pregnancy at Dr. Kate's office. They'd reduced their visits to once monthly, so by the time Sara finally shared the news at their next couples session, she relayed it almost like an apology, flinching in anticipation at their therapist's reaction. She hadn't been wrong to do so: Kate gaped at them both, stunned.

"Are you alright?" Michael asked, the corner of his mouth twitching at this role reversal. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"I'm guessing I'm too late for that," Kate mused, shaking her head. Sara noticed she was smiling, albeit in a slightly dazed manner. "Honestly," she said, still at a loss, looking between the two of them. "I don't even know where to start."

"Congratulations is customary," Michael suggested, laughter still dancing in his eyes. He was in a perpetually good mood these days; only now that Sara felt so much better did she realize how much he'd worried over her lack of appetite and fatigue.

Kate extended her hands to them both, palms open. "Congratulations," she told them, but even before the word landed, Sara suspected a second agenda. "You have just chosen your next therapy topic: Sara's pregnancy with Mike."

Sara sat back somewhat smugly. That's was alright…between her OB exam and various moments that had arisen naturally in the past weeks, she'd already shared quite a bit about her first pregnancy. "I've told Michael a lot already," she started, but Kate interrupted.

"No, no," she corrected mildly. "I meant, I want to hear from Michael, about his memories of those months."

Oh. Well, that would be harder.

Michael shifted uncomfortably in his seat, a common gesture for him in this office. He exhaled through his nose.

"That would have been right after you'd made the deal to get Sara out of Miami-Dade and back to Panama," Kate reminded him, as though any of them needed to consult a calendar.

"Well," Michael countered, "Sara's pregnancy began before that." He looked at her across the couch. "I was so happy," he told her. "Just as I am now."

She swallowed tightly. She remembered. She also remembered the nose bleeds, though, each one casting a new cloud on their blue sky existence after their exoneration.

"At the time, though," Michael said slowly, as though reading her mind, "I thought there was a very good possibility I might die, at least in the next year or so, either way."

Sara knew his deal with Poseidon (in this context, she never could call him Jacob) had included the additional surgeries that had ultimately saved his life, but she didn't want to think about that now. Or ever, really. Because when she did, she had to weigh Michael's health against her happiness. While she knew with certainty that had she been privy to the choice before him, she would have chosen the same as he, she would have arrived at this choice for different reasons. Specifically, for his safety, not hers. She couldn't think of his faked death in Miami-Dade, and his consequent departure from her life, without also feeling grateful for his heath, a dichotomy that plagued her regularly. Damn you, Dr. Kate. You're good.

"How did that affect your decision?" Kate asked Michael now.

Sara scrambled to catch back up…the nose bleeds. The mortality he'd faced. Michael answered easily, "It made it simple for me. If I wouldn't be around long anyway, if Sara was going to have to watch me die, I'd rather she not see it, and live in freedom."

"But then you didn't die," Kate pointed out.

"Yes," Michael conceded slowly. "That, I didn't quite anticipate." He smiled somewhat ruefully, looking at a fixed spot on the wall over Sara's shoulder. "Some days, I wished I had."

Sara looked at him sharply. "That's a ridiculous thing to say."

"Not really," he returned. "When you're dead, it's over and done, but for me…it felt just as over, but I got fragments of what I was missing, teasing glimpses, like spotting pockets of scenery through a bank of cloud from an airplane window. I had to live knowing you were mourning me, knowing I could fix it, but knowing I wouldn't. Knowing that eventually, life would go on for you, while I remained a ghost. Knowing that I wanted that for you, but also knowing that when it happened, I'd disappear just a little bit more. Counting the weeks, calculating exactly how pregnant you were, every day, and…missing it." This seemed to be the worst part, the part that hurt most.

"You won't miss it this time," she told him quietly. It was all she could offer.

"I can't get that back, though," he confided, his voice just over a whisper. "That time with you, waiting for Mike. It's gone."

Because Sara could say nothing to this, Dr. Kate said, "Let's talk about what that looked like for you. What you did instead, while Sara tried to make a life for herself in Panama, pregnant."

"I worked," Michael said darkly. "I paid my debt for Sara's freedom." He cast a glance at Sara, and she tried not to look tortured. "And it was worth it, every day." He pinched his eyes shut, remembering. "I always kept an app set to Panamanian time, so I'd know exactly…I don't know…just what day it was, I guess. Which week and month, leading up to the due date. But then…" he trailed off for a moment, his gaze casting him somewhere very far away. "I was sent to Geneva, for surgery, in late March, and I was out of it for about a week. I thought I'd missed it." He said this flatly, but he didn't need to clarify what 'it' was.

Mike's birth. "Did you? Miss it?" Sara asked.

"Yes," he said, still sounding painfully far away. "But not because I was in Geneva. I was in Russia that day, orchestrating the escape of an American spy out of a gulag in Volgograd." He closed his eyes again, and let a few tears run unchecked down his face before he swiped at them. "It didn't seem worth it that day. Not even for your freedom. I'm that selfish."

"You wanted to see Mike," Sara said. This didn't make him selfish.

"I wanted to see both of you, so desperately badly."

She thought of how she'd felt that day, wanting equally desperately for him to be there, so she could show him what she'd managed to accomplish, even with her heart torn in two. Maybe they hadn't been so very far apart, after all. "We actually were kind of together that day," she told him, "caught in the same misery."

He sighed shakily, giving her hand a squeeze across the couch. "After that, I started sneaking peeks at you both." He turned to Dr. Kate. "I'm only human."

Kate actually looked close to tears herself. "I really should stay out of this," she said sheepishly, reaching for a tissue from the box on the table, "but can I just say…I'm so glad you're having another baby together."

Sara looked to Michael in surprise. At Kate's statement, she could see traces of his earlier jovial mood returning to the corners of his mouth. "I think we broke our therapist," he told her solemnly, and for the first time since entering the office, Sara let herself laugh.