I squealed, and she shushed me, but her eyes were sparkling. “We’re not telling people. Not yet.”

“Let me throw your shower,” I offered.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head, reaching up to straighten her name tag, which read Toad. Somewhere, Wyatt must be in a green shirt, styling as Frog. “It seems like tempting fate, celebrating too much, too early.”

“You don’t have to have it tomorrow. You’ve got five more months.”

“Have yours with me,” she blurted out, and then her hand flew to her mouth. “I’m sorry. That was stupid. You want your own shower. You deserve your own. I just thought if there were two of us … but that was selfish.”

I wasn’t even listening to her apology. “Yes.”

“What?” She looked at me, her eyes wide.

“Yes, let’s have a joint shower. I mean, can we? We can’t throw our own.”

She waved her hand, as if that detail didn’t matter at all. “Really? You won’t feel cheated?”

“I’ll feel lucky.” And as the party swirled around us, I could almost forget that this life hadn’t been my original plan. Things were better, sweeter, than I had expected.

And this time, I hugged her.

CHAPTER

12

ELIZABETH WAS RIGHT to wave away my question of who would host our shower. Turned out that was another benefit of belonging to the Bluebonnets. Inés and Rachael took the lead, although to their credit, they tried to recruit Lena too. I was entering my third trimester, just a few weeks behind Elizabeth, on the day of the shower.

To Lena’s disgust, there was a decorate-the-onesie station, a guess-the-baby-food-flavor game, and a poster of celebrity baby pictures for people to identify. Lena busied herself rearranging the plates of tea sandwiches and bouquets of cake pops and refreshing the rainbow sherbet punch.

The worst part was when Elizabeth and I settled into chairs between the two gift tables, differentiated only by slightly more pink or blue tissue paper. As we took turns opening presents and holding up tiny outfits, oohing and aahing and thanking the gift giver who just couldn’t resist, Lena stayed on the edges of my vision.

I looked up from a bag full of board books to thank Rahmia, but I couldn’t find her friendly face in the throngs of women. At last I saw her standing by the door, talking on her cell phone, her expression uncharacteristically grim. I set the bag down by my chair and nodded to Elizabeth to open hers.

Finally the only gifts left were our matching towers of rolled diapers festooned with rattles and baby socks and bath toys, swathed in cellophane and bows. “Diaper cakes,” Elizabeth had whispered to me. “You can’t unwrap them or all the diapers will unroll and it’ll be a big mess.”