“He did it!” Zoe shouted, throwing her hands up and spinning on the tiles before wrapping her arms around his neck. We cheered and demanded the details. It was well past midnight before Todd left to go home. Zoe and I sat in her room for another half-hour, giggling and talking like schoolgirls, before I forced her to go to bed to at least try to sleep. An amorous Jack met me in the bedroom, and try as he might to distract me, something in his eyes told me he was hiding something.

Indeed he was. He wasn’t the least bit surprised when, a week later, Zoe came home from a date with a diamond on her hand.

Sometimes beautiful things happen to cushion us before life falls apart. One of those beautiful things was Zoe and Todd’s wedding, which we hosted the following June. It was weird having the house to ourselves again after Zoe moved out, but it started us thinking about when we might begin filling the house with mini-Harringtons.

The second week in September Zoe and Todd came for dinner, as they often did, but the minute they walked through the door we could tell something was wrong. We didn’t even make it past the foyer before Zoe choked out that the cancer was back. We spent the evening trying to be as jovial as possible, but the conversation kept coming back to chemo and mastectomies. A week later she began her treatments again. Todd was in my position now, putting on a brave face for Zoe but spilling his guts to Jack when they went out to give Zoe and me space during our girls-only nights.

In October I discovered I was pregnant. I was afraid to tell Zoe because I felt guilty for having so many good things in my life when hers was going so badly, but of course she was elated when she found out she would be an honorary aunt. She helped me decorate the nursery on her good days, and two months later she was once more declared cancer-free.

I did not do pregnancy well. The first trimester was a nightmare. I was sick as a dog half the day and exhausted all the time. Jack was taking a break from working, and he became my chef and masseuse and “gopher.” After the first trimester passed things began to get better, and we took a week’s vacation in Jamaica at the end of January to live it up while we still could. We returned to discover Zoe and Todd were also expecting; she, however, would go on to have the world’s easiest pregnancy, and I was only half joking when I told her I despised her good fortune.