“I’m glad to see you have—oh, shit—priorities.” Kate was in the middle of another contraction when the door to her room opened again. The nurse was first, followed by her mother and Johnny. Tully stood back, let everyone get in closer. At some point the nurse checked Kate’s cervix and called the doctor in. He bustled into the room, smiling as if he’d run into her at the grocery store, and put on some gloves. Then the stirrups came out and it was time.

“Push,” the doctor said in an entirely reasonable, pain-free voice that made Kate want to scratch his eyes out.

She screamed and pushed and cried until as quickly as it had begun, the agony was over.

“A perfect little girl,” the doctor said. “Dad, do you want to cut the cord?”

Kate tried to lift herself up, but she was too weak. A few moments later, Johnny was beside her, offering her a tiny pink-wrapped bundle. She took her new daughter in her arms and stared down into her heart-shaped face. She had a wild shock of damp black curls and her mother’s pale, pale skin, and the most perfect little lips and mouth Kate had ever seen. The love that burst open inside her was too big to describe. “Hey, Marah Rose,” she whispered, taking hold of her daughter’s grape-sized fist. “Welcome home, baby girl.”

When she looked up at Johnny, he was crying. Leaning down, he kissed her with a butterfly softness. “I love you, Katie.”

Never in her life had everything been so right in her world, and she knew that, whatever happened, whatever life had in store for her, she would always remember this single, shining moment as her touch of Heaven.

Tully begged for an additional two days off of work so that she could help Kate get settled in at home. When she’d made the call, it had seemed vital, unquestionably the thing to do.

But now, only a few hours after Kate and Marah had been discharged from the hospital, Tully saw the truth. She was about as useful as a dead microphone. Mrs. Mularkey was like a machine. She fed Kate before she even mentioned she was hungry; she changed the baby’s handkerchiefsized diapers like a magician; and taught Kate how to breast-feed her daughter. Apparently it was not as instinctual a thing as Tully would have thought.

And what was her contribution? When she was lucky, she made Kate laugh. More often than not, though, her best friend just sighed, looking both remarkably in love with her baby and profoundly worn out. Now Kate lay in bed, holding her baby in her arms. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Tully gazed down at the tiny, pink-swaddled bundle. “She sure is.”

Kate stroked her daughter’s tiny cheek, smiling down at her. “You should go home, Tully. Really. Come back when I’m up and around.”