I have much to be thankful for and I know it: my health, a good home, a stable marriage, a secure job that I mostly enjoy. But there’s something else I’ve been wanting—yearning for—for what feels like an impossibly long time now. And this time I thought, I really thought, that maybe, finally, I was going to have it.

I’ve more or less gotten my head around the false pregnancy thing by now but I’ll just say this: it didn’t feel false. It felt like something. Like…like a spark of sorts. Like it wasn’t just me in here anymore. I could have sworn I felt someone else, the glimmer of someone else, finally here with me.

“I’m so sorry, Gillian,” Dinah says. “I was rooting for you, you know that.”

“I know,” I say. I do know. Dinah’s a good friend.

She and I haven’t always been close, though we’ve known each other since grade school. We ran in different groups back then—I thought she was trouble and she thought I was a priss—but her family went through hard times a couple of years back and I think we both started to see each other in a new light since then. And then, the fact that her on-again off-again relationship with my husband’s brother finally cemented into something rock-solid was the clincher. These days Jeff and Dinah live just around the corner from Oliver and me, and I teach their daughter Josie at Birch Bend Elementary. As it happened, Dinah came into my life at exactly the right time—with most of my friends suddenly swallowed up by motherhood over the last few years, I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d become—and now I can’t imagine how the days would look without our friendship.

“I really believe it’ll happen for you, you know,” she goes on. “I’m not just saying that. You hear so many stories—people trying for ages and then, out of the blue…”