Here's the prompt I started with, from some website I don't remember:
The ultrasound come in and it turns out you and your spouse are having twins. Write the scene where you tell your family, especially your mother who for years has jokingly asked you to have twins.
Of course, as ~imagination is wont to have happen, it changed. Here we see Mariana and Julian, a few years after the novel itself would be ended:
"Mariana, you can't know for certain," he'd said, looking sceptically down at her swollen stomach. "You're just going on a hunch." Had she stayed with him instead of vice-versa, yes, they could know. But now they didn't even have a reliable pregnancy test, let alone an ultrasound-- it was obvious Mariana was pregnant, but that was as certain as they could be.
Mariana, however, shook her head. "Ne, I know. It is mother's--" then her face lit up in a way Julian hadn't seen in months-- "intuition. We shall have two darling babes, Julian. Matka always said that since her sister had twins, it is likely for me. And I will. A little boy called Cyril and a little girl called Klara. I know it."
Six months later, Julian sat anxiously in the hall of their home, holding tightly onto an old keepsake from Mariana in hopes that it would drown out any screams. (It didn't work.) The first person to emerge from the bedroom was not the midwife and definitely not Mariana, but Mrs. Tracey, Mariana's mother.
"We were right," she said plainly.
Julian got shakily to his feet and entered the room, unsure what he was going to see. He definitely hadn't expected it to be Mariana, pale and sweaty, holding two quiet bundles wrapped in cloth. "You were right," he parrotted, grin coming to his face.
Mariana smiled too, weakly. "No, Julian, I wasn't. These are your sons, Cyril and Augustin."
Close enough, he thought, going to meet his family.
