Melissa’s mouth dropped. How did she not know that? But then, she’d never been pregnant before.

“You’re fine. And the bigger your baby gets, the more you’re going to feel. My last one was a boy, and it felt like he wanted to be a linebacker for the Colts!”

Melissa laughed and put a hand on her belly. Tears came. Since she’d made the decision on the doctor’s exam table at the clinic, she’d known she’d done the right thing. The movement inside gave her a little more courage to continue.

Brian had always been interested in computers. As a kid he took apart old video game consoles and figured out how to put them back together. In the process, he learned how to fix ones that didn’t work.

At a family reunion he attended—without Melissa—an uncle came up to him at the bonfire toward the end of the night. As children roasted marshmallows and caught fireflies, his uncle asked his plans for the future.

“Have you thought of going to college?” the man said.

“Sure. I’ve thought of going to the Indianapolis 500, too, but I don’t have the money.”

His uncle smiled. “If you went, what would you want to study?”

“Honestly, I’d probably go to a technical college. I like working with computers. I’ve thought about becoming a programmer.”

His uncle nodded. “The community college has a computer course. It’s a lot more affordable than going to a university. Do you know Clive Lawson?”

“The TV repair guy?”

“That’s him. He’s looking for an assistant at his shop. He works on televisions, computers, and small appliances. Not easy work, but you could save up some money and maybe go to that computer course.”

The next day Brian drove to the repair shop and Clive gave him a box of tools and told him to pull the fan out of an old IBM computer. He came back with it in less than ten minutes and was hired on the spot.

Brian and Melissa celebrated that night with pizza. She let him put his hand on her belly when she felt the baby moving, and though he couldn’t feel anything, he pretended he did. They talked about the future and how long it would take for Brian to make it through school and start work. Melissa said she would start working after the first of the year and they could dream about owning a house.

Two weeks later, Brian was on his lunch break at the shop when a wrecker pulled into the salvage yard next door with a badly damaged VW. He heard the driver say that there had been a fatality in the accident.