Aidan surprised me sometimes. He was soccer-obsessed and could be spiteful, like insisting on calling all the fifth graders “babies,” but then he’d do something nice that reminded me he was a big brother to two younger sisters. He had a patience for Sam that no amount of politeness gave me.

“So it is still a secret, technically,” Aidan finished.

“Like my mom being pregnant?”

We all stopped walking, and I spun toward Sam, my face aflame and fists clenched. My heart was about to beat right out of my chest.

Jed’s hand landed on my shoulder, and he pulled me back a bit. “Fred, you can’t . . .”

Aidan looked from me to Sam and back again.

“That wasn’t your secret to tell!” I yelled.

And then I watched Sam’s eyes fill with tears. He screamed right back at me, “It’s my secret more than yours!” He raced off ahead of us, his backpack bouncing as he ran to the end of the street and our house. My house.

At dinner I was surprised that Sam hadn’t said anything about that afternoon, and that Anika and Luca hadn’t either. I was so certain he’d tell on me, even though I wasn’t sure what for. He’d been right, the baby was more his sibling than mine—which meant it was more his secret to tell.

“You’re being awfully quiet tonight,” Luca said as he washed our plates. “Everything okay at school, Freddo?”

I shrugged and kept on drying.

“Oh, are we already onto the surly teenager routine, then?” But he smiled when he said it, and gently bumped his hip into me, until I pretended to smile back.

“Where are you going to put the baby?” I blurted, without even knowing the question was on my mind. “Where will it sleep?”

Luca paused for a second, but then he picked up the pace again and shrugged. “Not sure yet, but I was thinking of maybe building a kennel for it in the backyard?”

I rolled my eyes when he laughed at his own silly joke, but then he said, “We don’t know, Freddo. It’ll definitely be a squeeze once it’s older. Actually . . .” He dried his soapy hands on the hand towel and turned to me. “Anika and I were thinking—and we’ll have to talk to Jeff about it too, since it’s still your pop’s house—maybe we’d look at converting your bedroom into two rooms?”

I whipped my head around to stare at him.

Luca held up his hands. “Whoa! It’s just preliminary discussions at this point, Winifred. Nothing is set in stone!” That was another policeman word: preliminary. No matter what the dictionary said, it meant that Luca wasn’t just thinking about doing something. It was definitely going to happen.

“But that’s Mom’s room!”