I liked learning and teaching myself cool medical stuff, too, probably because I spend so much time around doctors. Most of that stuff is fascinating, and very good to know. A few things, though, are not so good.

Like how sometimes when a baby is ready to be born, it isn’t facing the right way, and the baby and the mommy can get really hurt. Maybe even die. That is called breech.

Like how sometimes a baby gets born much, much too early, and it’s like taking muffins out of the oven when they’re still soupy goopy dough, except with a baby it’s things like their heart and lungs and brain that aren’t ready. That is called premature.

Like how sometimes if the mom’s body can tell that there is something wrong with the baby, something like a missing chromosome, it will get rid of the baby on its own. Whether the mom wants to or not. That’s that scary word again: miscarriage.

Now that there was an actual new baby coming into the family, I couldn’t get those things out of my head. I was lying on my bed thinking about my letter and everything I knew about pregnancy and looking at the posters on my wall, and I think that’s what gave me the idea.

Everything was converging, and Cecilia was in the middle of it.

It was time for a Universe Deal. The most important deal I’d ever make.

There are two posters next to my bed. One is of the muscles in the human body. Those are much harder to memorize than bones. The other poster is of the Milky Way.

I could hear Mom and Nonny in the kitchen down the hall, laughing about something. The whole time she’d been here we’d never stopped talking about the baby. She finds out next month if it’s a boy or a girl. She and Thomas haven’t decided on names yet.

I knew exactly who could help. Cecilia wasn’t a biologist, but she took something beautiful and mysterious and figured out each of the beautiful and mysterious things that went into it, and isn’t creating a new person the exact same thing? If there was someone on the other side—someone in the afterlife—who could figure out how to keep Nonny’s baby perfectly healthy and perfectly safe, maybe it was her. Plus, Cecilia had had kids. Three of them. She knows what it’s like.

I knew Cecilia could help me, because the woman who figured out what stars are made of had to be one of the smartest women in the world. She was there in the middle of both of my Big Questions, my answer and my solution to helping Nonny with both her financial black hole and with being sure of a safe, healthy baby.

I walked to my window and looked out at the sky that was still bright and clear and blue. Remember that old song from the movie Pinocchio? About wishing on stars? Did you ever wonder where the idea of wishing on stars came from? I looked it up once, and it goes back a long time. A way long time. So it went like this—way back in ancient Greece there was this guy Ptolemy. He wrote about how sometimes the gods got bored doing their normal, godly things and sometimes they would look down from the heavens onto the human, mortal world. And sometimes when they did that, a star would accidentally get knocked loose. So when you saw a shooting star it meant they were looking down on you. It meant they were listening and might possibly grant you your wish.