A few days later Reid and Maeve spent their anniversary at home, together on the couch next to a roaring fire in the living room fireplace, with takeout food from their favorite restaurant and a bottle of sparkling non-alcoholic wine… it was essentially fizzy grape juice but it tasted better than the real thing… it was nice just to be home…to be together, to have a romantic evening not turn into a rain check delivered by a phone call and a flower delivery carrying an apology card.

They were snuggled together on the couch next to the fireplace. It was almost surreal, that here he was, celebrating a full year since he and Maeve had married, and now he knew that she wasn't the only one snuggled in his arms.

"This is nice…"

"Yeah, it's good to be home…and we cracked that local case…"

"I know…I read the paper. I knew you would…"

"Say, I wanted to talk to you about something…"

"Ok…?"

"When do you think we should tell the others?" He asked.

"You mean they don't already know? You spend all day with five other profilers and an extremely curious and computer-savvy force of nature named Penelope Garcia, and you're really not all that hard to read. I wasn't exactly expecting to be able to keep it a secret all that long…"

"Oh they definitely know that there's something going on…I think Hotch and Rossi might have an idea, and Morgan is on the right track… but so far no one knows anything for certain. You know what their next question will be once they actually find out…"

"Yes, and even we don't know the answer to that yet… although I did schedule the test that will tell us… it's happening three weeks from tomorrow…"

"Is that something I need to try to be here for…?"

"Not really, the baby's still too young for that type of thing to be visible by ultrasound…and a karyotype isn't much of a spectator sport… I was going to have one done anyway just because, well…look at our track record…since when has anything gone our way without something going wrong?"

"Never…" he replied, it was true, from the very beginning it seemed that although everything had always turned out alright in the end, it seemed that everything that could have possibly gone wrong along the way, had.

"Exactly, and a karyotype won't pick up on everything but it will pick up on big chromosomal problems if there are any and it will also tell us much more definitively whether we have a son or a daughter. It doesn't get much more concrete than DNA. All the actual test involves is extracting a small amount of fluid from the amniotic sack, there will be stray fetal cells floating in it and then another geneticist will put the chromosomes in pairs, put the pairs in order, and then analyze them for abnormalities in number or structure… After the fluid extraction the rest of it will be carried out in a lab so no you don't need to be there. I'd like it if you were but you're not going to end up sleeping in Peanut's doghouse if you get called away on a case and can't make this one."

"Ok, things have been kind of quiet compared to how it usually is for us but I have a feeling that's not going to last much longer. I have some time coming but I was actually planning on saving it for when the baby actually comes." He said.

He hadn't explained his planned use of the rest of the vacation time he had coming to anyone, not Hotch, not even Maeve… it had been a rough couple of years so he was amazed he still had enough left for what he intended to do with it. Between the month solid he'd taken for the wedding and honeymoon, then the family reunion before that, and his own brush with death at the hands of pneumonic plague smack in-between and of course his minimum of two two-week visits every year to his mother…. Yep…the fact that he still had another two-months coming was nothing short of a miracle.

"You're going to stick around here and help me afterwards?" Maeve asked, sounding almost as surprised as she was elated.

"Well yeah…this is our baby…and I wanna be here when we bring him or her home, I want to be around as much as I can and I'm planning it out so I can be…"

"I just have one question…" Maeve asked.

"What's that?" he asked.

"How on Earth did I get so lucky?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well usually all the guy cares about is putting food on the table… they don't want any ridiculously late or early wake up calls and resist helping with any of the dirty work…basically they try to put as much of that on the mother or baby-sitter as they possibly can until the child is old enough to start playing with you…"

"That…is just…not right…"

"And that…is one of the ten-thousand things I love about you…Happy Anniversary Spencer…"

"Happy Anniversary to both of us…" he said, reaching up for a kiss...

Three weeks later…

Maeve's best friend, Dr. Megan Hunt, was a neurologist first and foremost but in the past year she had added a masters in human genetics, and had taken over most of the laboratory portion of her friend's job while Maeve could not be in the lab. Earlier that morning she had helped to extract a sample of the amniotic fluid Maeve's baby was living in.

Now she was in the lab, with her shoulder-length red hair pulled back into a braid so that it wouldn't get in her way. She was looking at the chromosomes from one of the fetal cells extracted with the fluid sample under an electron microscope and putting them in order.

At first glance everything looked normal, she was able to put a complete set in order with everything accounted for. Nothing missing, not a gene out of place… but once she had done that she realized there were extras where they shouldn't exist…a lot of extras… a baby with this many extra chromosomes shouldn't have survived this far into pregnancy…

What the hell is all this? Megan asked herself. She checked, there was only one amniotic sack, one placenta, and according to the ultrasound scans from almost a month prior… one baby… But then again ultrasounds were known for still giving false negatives for any number of things.

She looked at the slide in front of her again…then she started to organize the extras into a separate karyotype and that's when she realized what she was looking at. It was so rare, that to see it here before her in real life, felt like getting the wind knocked out of her. She took several slow steps back, the only sounds in the room were the hum of the equipment, her own heavy breathing, and the squeak of her flats on the linoleum floor. Then she ran from the lab downstairs to her office in the hospital and grabbed her cellphone. She needed to talk to both of them, immediately.