Methodically, she wrapped the two test sticks in toilet paper, dropped them into the trash can, then washed her hands. The reality of her pregnancy had only reached her head, not her heart, and she was determined to keep it there.

“Stay rational,” she whispered to herself as she left the bathroom. “Stay calm and logical and…” Tears burned her eyes, but she kept them at bay until reaching her bedroom. Lying down on the bed, she rested her hands lightly on her flat belly and stared at the dark ceiling.

This can’t be happening, she thought. A bad joke. Wrong timing. Wrong man.

She was fairly early. Early enough for an abortion, at any rate. She knew the exact date of conception: eight weeks ago. Quickly, she blocked the memory of that night from her mind before it could haunt her any more than it already did. She didn’t need a pregnancy to remind her of what she’d done.

Rolling onto her side, she thought of going to an out-of-town women’s clinic for an abortion. She knew many local obstetricians on a professional basis, since she was the social worker in the maternity unit at Silas Memorial Hospital in Monterey, but she didn’t dare go to anyone who knew her. Only eight weeks. It would be easy. Over in a snap. But how could she possibly have an abortion? How could she part with a longed-for child?

Getting out of bed, she walked over to the window and stared into the gray night fog, thinking through her options. Each of them was fraught with complications, some with the potential to hurt other people even more than herself. Eight weeks pregnant. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the window. There would be no sleep for her tonight. Only more staring into the fog, more tossing and turning in bed, as she struggled with the alternatives.

But beneath her worry and fear and uncertainty was a vague, yet alluring, hint of joy.

The maternity unit looked entirely different to Joelle when she stepped inside the Women’s Wing of Silas Memorial Hospital the following day.

As she did every morning, she walked toward the nurses’ station, past the open doors of the patients’ rooms. This morning, though, the sight of the women walking slowly through the corridor as they healed and the cries of babies from the rooms held a different meaning for her. In mere months, she could be one of these women. One of the crying, hungry, beautiful babies could be hers.

She found Serena Marquez at the nurses’ station and held out her arms to the head nurse.

“You’re back!” Joelle said, giving her a hug. “Do you have pictures?”

“Does she have pictures,” one of the other nurses said, wearing a grin. “I think she spent her entire maternity leave with a camera glued to her face. Hope you have all morning, Joelle.”

Joelle leaned on the counter, her hands outstretched. “Let’s see them,” she said to Serena.

“We should talk about your referrals first.” Serena was beaming, clearly anxious to hand pictures of her little boy over to an apt audience, but motioning instead toward the forms in Joelle’s hands.

Joelle took a seat on one of the stools, then read aloud the names on the forms, and Serena pulled the plastic binders containing each patient’s medical record from the turntable on the desk. Joelle studied the referrals: two requests for help at home for a couple of single mothers, one case of questionable bonding between mother and baby, one baby born to a cocaine addict, one father denying paternity, one stillbirth. It was a typical batch of referrals for the maternity unit, including the stillbirth. In Joelle’s line of work, where she was invited to see only the problems and rarely the joy, dealing with the family of a stillborn infant was all in a day’s work. It was never easy, though, and today in particular, when the pink and blue lines were still very much in her mind, she winced as she read through the woman’s chart. This was the woman’s second stillborn baby. She looked at Serena.

“How is she doing?” Joelle asked.

“Not too well,” Serena said. “Nice lady. Thirty-five. They lost the first baby and had been trying hard for this one, apparently.”

Thirty-five. If she were to have this baby, she, too, would be thirty-five when it was born.

“Why is she losing them?” Joelle asked.

Serena shook her head. “Unknown cause.”

“Poor thing,” Joelle said. “To go through this twice, with no answers…” She asked Serena a few more questions about the woman and her family, then reached once again for the pictures of the head nurse’s baby. She glanced from the pictures to Serena, as she sorted through them. Serena’s cheeks were pink, and although she had not lost all the weight she’d gained during her pregnancy, there was a radiance about her that Joelle envied. The nurse was twenty-eight, and this had been her first child. Joelle wondered if, while Serena was pregnant, she, too, had experienced the maternity unit in a different way. She didn’t dare ask.

She made the mother of the stillborn infant her first stop, noticing as soon as she walked into the patient’s room that the woman looked a little like her. She had long, thick dark hair with deep bangs and was more cute than pretty. She looked more like thirty than thirty-five. Her husband sat at his wife’s bedside, holding her hand, and her mother sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, her hand resting on her daughter’s leg through the bedclothes. There was love in the room, an almost palpable sense of caring between the husband and his wife. That was the difference between herself and this patient, she thought. This woman was married, with a husband who obviously loved her.

“How could this happen again?” the woman’s mother asked, a question Joelle could not answer. She rarely had answers in these situations. All she had was the training and experience to anticipate what the family was feeling, and the skill to provide comfort or support. She spoke with them for quite a while, letting them talk and cry over their loss, then asked them if they wanted to see their baby.

“No,” the woman said emphatically. “We saw our last baby. We held her and…” She began to cry. “I can’t go through it again. I don’t want to see this one.”

Joelle nodded. Ordinarily, she might try to persuade the parents to see their infant, but in this case, she was willing to accept their decision. They knew what they were turning down. She didn’t blame them, yet she would stop back later, in case they changed their minds.

She left the room after half an hour, knowing that this particular woman, who looked like her and who had tried hard to get pregnant, would stay with her. Two babies, loved and lost. Joelle thought of the tiny life growing inside her and admitted to herself what she had known since seeing the pink line in the middle of the night: she could not abort her baby.

The hospital cafeteria had been remodeled the previous year with mauve walls and huge windows that looked out on Silas Memorial’s parklike courtyard. Joelle stood in the entrance to the dining area, holding her tray, trying to convince herself that the scent of the liver and onions on her plate was tantalizing rather than revolting. She’d selected the liver, along with spinach and a glass of milk, for her lunch. She was eating for her baby, the baby she was going to have, no matter what the cost. Searching the tables for her two fellow social workers, she spotted the men near the windows and walked toward them.

“Hi, guys,” she said, setting her tray on the table and taking a seat adjacent to Paul and across the table from Liam. The three of them ate together nearly every day, whenever their schedules would allow it.

“What’s with the liver?” Paul grimaced in the direction of her tray.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just felt like a change.”

Paul Garland handled the pediatric and AIDS units. He’d only worked at Silas Memorial for a year, but he’d had previous hospital experience and had fit in well. Liam Sommers had been the social worker for the AIDS unit at the time of Paul’s arrival, and Paul had begged to take over that assignment with such fervor that Liam had agreed. Joelle and Liam had speculated that Paul was gay. He was a stunningly handsome man, always neatly tailored, with stylishly short black hair, green eyes and a sexy crooked smile, and everyone knew he had once modeled for a department-store chain. But they soon realized, especially after meeting Paul’s fiancée, that he was quite straight, and that his interest in AIDS patients was born of his compassion for them, nothing more.

Liam, who covered the emergency room, as well as the oncology and cardiac units, was Paul’s opposite, at least physically. His hair was light brown and on the long side. It had a bit of wave to it, and it grazed the top of his ears and the nape of his neck in a way that Joelle found appealing. His eyes were a pale, pale blue. The few times Joelle had seen Liam in a suit, he’d looked almost silly; this was a man cut out for T-shirts, maybe a Hawaiian-print shirt or plaid flannel in cooler weather. He had a warm, white smile that had been all but absent this past year. She missed seeing it across the table from her at lunch.

Since starting to work at Silas Memorial nearly ten years earlier, Joelle’s assignments in the hospital had been the Women’s Wing and general surgery, but she and Paul and Liam covered for one another as needed. When one of them had too much on his or her plate, the other two would pitch in, so they always tried to keep one another abreast of their cases.

“How is your day going?” Liam asked her as she took a bite of liver. It was not too bad with the onions to mask the flavor.

“Okay, except for a stillbirth. It’s their second.”

“Second child or second stillbirth?” Paul asked.

“Second stillbirth. With no apparent cause.” She ran her fork through the dull green, obviously canned, spinach. “It’s gotten to me, for some reason.” She wished she could tell them, but knew it would be a long time before she revealed her pregnancy to anyone. She would hold out as long as she could before letting the rest of the world in on the unplanned, and possibly reckless, choice she had made.

“Why do you think?” Paul asked.

She shrugged, cutting another piece of liver.

“Because you struggled with fertility yourself,” Liam offered. “Of course it gets to you.”

“That’s probably it,” she said, willing to allow Liam that explanation. “And what are you two dealing with today?”

The men took turns discussing their cases, and Joelle listened as she forced down the liver, bit by bit. The three of them used to be jocular with one another, but a pall had settled over them a little more than a year ago, when Liam’s wife, Mara, suffered an aneurysm while giving birth to their first child. In the days following the birth, Silas Memorial’s nurses and doctors, various technicians and even the custodial staff, would come up to Liam during lunch to ask him how his wife was doing. Gradually, their concerned questions slowed, then stopped, as word got around that Mara would never recover. Only people very close to Liam bothered to ask anymore. Mara had been moved from the hospital to a rehab center, then soon after into a nursing home as it was determined that rehabilitation wouldn’t help her. They had found an excellent nursing home for her; Liam and Joelle and Paul certainly knew which homes were the best in the area. But sometimes Joelle wondered if it mattered. Although Mara seemed strangely content, even joyous at times, a phenomenon that her doctors described as euphoria brought on by brain damage, she didn’t know that the little boy who visited her with Liam was her son. Joelle, herself, stopped by the nursing home at least once a week, and although Mara was full of smiles and looked delighted to see her, she didn’t seem to understand that Joelle had once been her friend. Nor did she recognize her own mother. She welcomed everyone, from her child to the electrician, into her room with equal pleasure.

She knew Liam, though. It was obvious in the way she lit up when he appeared in her doorway at the nursing home, and in the sounds she made, like a puppy whose owner had returned after an absence. Joelle wasn’t certain if Mara’s surprising good cheer made it easier or harder for those who loved her to cope with her condition. Mara had never been the sort of woman one would describe as perpetually cheerful, and her simple happiness made her seem like a stranger. It had been only in the last few months that Joelle could drive away from the nursing home after a visit without crying in her car.

Mara had been Joelle’s closest friend for years. A psychiatrist in private practice, Mara had specialized in psychological problems related to pregnancy and childbirth, and Joelle would bring her in as a consultant from time to time on her hospital cases. She’d been drawn to Mara the instant she met her. Two years older than Joelle, Mara had worn her straight dark hair to her shoulders, and her nearly black eyes were intense against her fair skin. She was a remarkable mixture of qualities and interests: young doctor, novice folk musician, churchgoing Roman Catholic, yoga instructor and avid runner who had participated in three marathons and was fluent in several languages. Although Mara was the consummate professional while at work, once she and Joelle were alone, she slipped easily into girl talk, the sort of sharing of intimacies that created a treasured and unbreakable bond. It was Joelle who had introduced Mara to Liam, after he started working at Silas Memorial, and she couldn’t have been more pleased when those two people she cared about began to love each other.