“Uh-huh. Sure.” She graciously accepted the ranunculus, spray rose, and blue thistle crown and set it atop her head. She smiled and offered a weak thank-you, thinking how wrong it felt to wear such a cheerful crown when she felt so anxious, so scared.

“You look like some sort of pagan fertility goddess.” Ethan winked.

“Ha, right.” Sadie instinctively set her hands over her stomach.

“You okay?” Ethan looked down at her, wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders.

She smiled up into his handsome face, the same one that always made her go a little weak in the knees—that is when she wasn’t wanting to bang him over the head with a whiffle ball bat. “I’m just glad to be with you,” she said truthfully.

He planted a soft, perfect kiss on her forehead.

Castaway Yarn’s float made its way down the street. Every year, the shop’s float featured a giant ball of yarn surrounded by volunteers holding various rescue cats and kittens. By the end of the celebration, most of the precious pets were already adopted.

“Kitties!” Lincoln pointed at a small tabby. He was orange with green eyes. “Dat one. Dat one mine?”

“Sorry, bud. Daddy’s allergic,” Ethan replied smoothly.

“Lergic?”

“It means cats make Daddy sick,” he explained. “I sneeze and cough! We don’t want that to happen, do we?”

Lincoln stared before shaking his head solemnly. “Daddy no sick.”

She watched the bank’s float go by. They’d crafted a “money tree” surrounded by springtime blooms—a joke, of course, but slightly cringe-inducing. Next year, when she and Renee had opened Hester’s, they would create a wonderful float, something imaginative, thoughtful, and clever. Maybe they could bake up tiny hand pies to give out to the crowd as they sashayed down the main drag.

“Sade, you getting hungry yet?” Ethan asked.

Her stomach growled, a reminder she was eating for two. God. At least she prayed she still was. “Maybe a little bit.”

Lincoln clapped. “Me too! Me hungry.”

“Lobster rolls?” she suggested.

“You read my mind,” he said with the confidence of a man whose wife knew him so completely that of course she could guess his appetite’s desires. “Let’s head over to the Lobster Shack before it gets too crowded.”

As they stood in line, Lincoln gleefully climbed up Ethan’s strong, well-muscled legs, his father’s hands gripped around his tiny wrists and holding him steady. Sadie stood beside them, overwhelmingly sad and exhausted. Lincoln might not be a big brother after all. Ethan might not get to be a dad again. She might not get to be a mom for a second time.

“Sadie?”

She whirled around. It was her gynecologist, Dr. Jennings, also known as the absolute last person she’d hoped to run into today.