My friends crowded the living room with paper plates of cake. My mother fussed over the food table like she was catering a wedding instead of a birthday. My younger sister, Emily, kept giving me knowing looks because she was the only one who suspected I was hiding something.
Inside my purse was a folded sonogram photo.
By the end of the night, I was going to tell everyone that I was pregnant.
I had spent the entire week planning the moment. Not in some giant, over-the-top internet way. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t the woman who rented fog machines or arranged matching shirts or made a ten-slide presentation about becoming a mother. I just wanted one honest, joyful moment in a house I had spent two years turning into a home.
I was going to wait until after cake.
I had already imagined it a dozen times. My mother would cry first. Emily would scream. Our friends would start talking all at once. And Derek—my fiancé, the man I had loved for four years, the man I had planned to marry in October—would come around the kitchen island, look at the sonogram photo, and kiss me with that stunned, crooked grin that first made me fall for him.
I believed that right up until the moment he handed me the gift box.
