I'm just the quiet one in a group of women at a mall, and nobody looking at us would know the difference, and I keep catching myself almost forgetting.
* * *
We're sharing a plate of something fried in the food court, and Rosa's arguing with Nova about a purse.
Ruby's got a lemonade she keeps not drinking, turning the straw around and around. Then she says it, low, only for the table.
"I'm pregnant."
Nova drops the purse mid-sentence. "Ruby."
"About nine weeks." She's gone pink to the ears. "I haven't told Zorro. I'm telling him this weekend, I've got a whole plan, so nobody breathe a word, I mean it, Nova, I can see you about to come apart?—"
"I'm not going to come apart."
"You're the color of a stop sign."
"I'mhappy." Nova's got both hands clamped over her mouth. "Look how normal I'm being about this. Look at me."
Lashes has Hope up on her shoulder and she's grinning around the baby's head. "Leo's getting a sibling."
"Leo's going to be furious," Ruby says. "That boy does not share."
They're laughing, all of them, warm and low, and Ruby's pink and lit up and turning her lemonade straw, and there's a whole life sitting out in front of her that she gets to walk into.
A second baby. A husband she's planning a surprise for. And it comes up in me before I can head it off.
It isn't jealousy. I wish it were. Jealousy would be simpler.
My body starts counting.
It does that on its own now, without me—how many of mine, how many they took, and Ruby gets to sit in a food court and tell her news to a table full of women who love her.
Lashes' hand finds my knee underneath it.
She doesn't look at me. She keeps grinning at Ruby, and she squeezes once, hard, and lets go.
I get my breath back on my own.
"Congratulations," I tell Ruby, and I mean it.
She smiles at me like she knows exactly what those four syllables took and isn't going to make me say any more.
After we finish eating, we head into a smaller sort of boutique in the mall.
Nova finds the dress.
Dark green, simple, cut narrow for a body like mine, and she holds it against me in the middle of the store with her head tipped to one side.
"This one. You're trying it."
"Nova—"
"You don't have to buy it. You don't have to like it. Four seconds so I can see if I'm right, and I'malwaysright, and then you can go back to your dad's shirt." She's already steering me to the back. "Lashes, referee. She won't come out for just me."
"I trust you," I say.
"You trust me a normal amount for a week. Get in there."
