John is sitting on the floor with his guitar, strumming softly, his hair brushing over the scars that trail across his left shoulder and down to his ribs. Another, smaller scar cuts across the inside of his right forearm, and a faint one presses near his lower back where the bullet had barely missed his spine. The hospital lights had been cold, the metal table even colder, but somehow, he’d stayed. The world didn’t lose him that night.

You’ve been with him for ten months, still getting used to waking up to him humming under his breath, rolling over and giving you that grin that tries to hide the shadows in his eyes.

A cryptic pregnancy is when you’re pregnant, but you don’t know because you don’t show or have normal symptoms. Periods still come, tests read negative, and doctors don’t notice—until one day, you just know.

You knew one morning when you felt a kick, small but real, under your ribs while John was humming “Dear Prudence.” He dropped the guitar, came to you, pressed his palm over the spot, and laughed—a real, young laugh you’d never heard from him before.

Two weeks later

Julian comes over first, awkward in the doorway, with John trying to hide how nervous he is, running his hand through his long hair. Then Sean comes, holding onto a teddy bear he’s outgrown, but he wants to show his dad anyway.

You all sit down in the living room. John chews on his thumbnail. You tell them gently, explaining it was a cryptic pregnancy and you didn’t know, but now they’re going to have a sibling.

Julian’s eyes flicker to John. “You always have a kid, then you leave,” he says, not harsh, just a truth that lives in him.

John’s face cracks for a moment, the kind of pain that never fully leaves, the kind that makes him write songs at 3 a.m. He reaches out, holding Julian’s hand, pulling Sean onto his lap.

“I’m not leaving this time,” he says, voice low, thick. His hand presses over the faint scar near his ribs, like a promise to himself.

You all sit there, in the glow of the lamps and the quiet, with John’s guitar leaning against the couch, ready for the song he will write for the baby. Ready for a different kind of beginning in 1983.