“Margaret,” Dottie said, glancing up, as if to make sure they couldn’t be heard. She took a deep breath and exhaled in a nervous stutter. “I’m…I’m just going to say this.”

Margaret set down the jadeite bowl she was holding. Dottie had been looking uncommonly tired lately and Margaret feared that her friend wasn’t getting enough to eat. Much like the rest of them. Dinner tonight had been watered-down tomato sauce over rice, hardly enough to keep anyone full overnight. They saved their chicken cards for Sundays.

“Say what?”

Dottie lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m receiving a visit from the stork.”

Blood rushed from her head to her toes.

She immediately pictured the implications, much like how people’s lives were said to flash before their eyes before they died. This was not the joyous news it would have been in a different circumstance. Dottie’s devout parents would surely be livid and turn her out. She’d be let go from her position at the Navy Yard.

She’d be destitute.

Because John had been drafted before the wedding could take place.

Margaret grabbed Dottie’s hands, suds forming a bubbling cuff, and squeezed them to keep them from trembling. Though she couldn’t tell who was shaking harder. “Are you sure? Did you go to the doctor?”

Dottie shook her head, and her long, dark curls bounced from side to side. “Of course not. The rabbit test would be too expensive, and I’d be devastated for one to die on my behalf. But it explains my nausea. And my exhaustion. And why…why my monthly didn’t come.”

“The rabbit test?” Margaret asked. Dottie had been a nanny for an Upper East Side family last summer when the mother had become in the family way for a third time. So of course she would know the latest things like that.

“Yes. They make you”—she lowered her voice even more, looking around as if someone might come in—“go into a cup. And then they inject it into a female rabbit and cut it open to see if its ovaries reacted.”

Margaret was appalled, and the image of it distracted her for a moment from the weight of the news. “They really do that?”

Dottie nodded and her curls fell over the right side of her face at their part. “Well, I guess the doctors for rich women do.”

“That might be the only thing that makes me grateful I’m not rich.”

A thin smile spread across Dottie’s face. “Me too.”

“How do you know that’s even true?”

“The woman I nannied for was a showgirl before she became the second wife of a banker on Wall Street. The things she talked about would curl your hair.”

Margaret laughed. “Is that how you got this mop?” She ran a finger down a lock of Dottie’s hair and it bounced right back into position.