It had been impossible to get any rest after that. Dottie had stayed until The Great Gildersleeve gave way to Dreft Star Playhouse on NBC and it had occurred to Margaret that its host, Marvin Miller, had the unenviable task of promoting a product that was no longer available. Even the loss of something as otherwise insignificant as dish detergent was like another knife in her already worried heart. Each one took her by surprise—there was no solace to be found in everyday routines because they, too, had been altered.

Regular reminders that nothing was what it should be.

At last the radio turned silent as Margaret’s parents went to sleep. Dottie looked at her watch and apologized for the late hour and hurried home with Margaret’s promise that they would get through this together.

It was a night saturated with concern. For John. For Dottie. For the world. When Margaret’s alarm clock sounded in the dark early hours, she swung leaded feet onto the floor and pulled herself up by her bedpost, exhaustion weighing heavily on every bone in her body.

Margaret stood now, head to door, eyes closed and listening to the sounds of the morning as it mustered the energy to turn into day. Birds perched on electrical wires, the baker’s ovens hummed, car horns blared as drivers maneuvered their way down streets that fell into worse disrepair as each day passed. Resources were needed elsewhere.

She felt unraveled. It was the Word of the Day in yesterday’s New York Times and she thought it an ideal term for the circumstance. Like spiraled heaps of yarn laying waste after discovering a flaw in a knitting project.

Dreams were like that too. You imagined what your life would be like and it didn’t turn out to be so. She remembered sitting under red-and-white umbrellas at the shore the first summer she met Dottie and all the ones after that. Little girls with big plans who never could have imagined what a world at war might look like.

What having a baby under these circumstances would mean.

Indeed, Dottie’s news had left Margaret feeling tangled up inside. That her dearest friend was pregnant should have been something to celebrate. Their childhood full of dolls and dress-up and playing house was about to blossom into something real and wriggling.

It was all they’d ever wanted.

But one paramount step in the long-ago playacting had been bypassed: the wedding.

It’s not that Margaret held any religious opinions on the order in which things had happened. The joy she felt at the revelation was genuine—in seven months or so, a little niece or nephew would make an entrance into the world. Margaret’s brother, John, was the father and she had always known that he would make such a very, very good one.

It was the need for secrecy that unsettled her.