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side and absently rub my hand over the spot.
    My mother reads from a paper Alexa has printed off the Internet. “A baby lion is a . . .”
    My cousin’s hand shoots up. “Cub!” she yells out.
    “Right! A baby fish is a . . . ?”
    “Caviar?” Vanessa suggests.
    “Fry,” Wanda says.
    “That’s a verb,” Isobel argues.
    “I’m telling you, I saw it on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire— ”
    Suddenly I am seized by a cramp so intense that all the breath rushes out of my body.
    “Zoe?” My mother’s voice seems far away. I struggle to my feet.
    Twenty-eight weeks, I think. Too soon.
    Another current rips through me. As I fall against my mother, I feel a warm gush between my legs. “My water,” I whisper. “I think it just broke.”
    But when I glance down, I am standing in a pool of blood. Last night was the first night Max and I ever talked about baby names.
    “Johanna,” I whispered, after he turned out the light.
    “Sorry to disappoint,” Max said. “But it’s just me.”
    In the dark, I could see his smile. Max is the sort of man I never imagined would be attracted to me—big, broad, a surfer with a shock of blond hair and enough wattage in his smile to make grocery clerks drop his change and soccer moms slow down near our driveway. I was always considered smart, but by no stretch of the imagination am I a looker. I am the girl next door, the wallflower, the one whose features you cannot recall. The first time he talked to me—at his brother’s wedding, where I was filling in for the lead vocalist in the band, who’d developed a kidney stone—I turned around, certain that he was speaking to someone else. Years later he told me that he never knew what to say to girls but that my voice was like a drug; it had seeped into his veins and given him the courage to come up to me during the band’s fifteen-minute break.
    He didn’t think a woman with a master’s degree in musicology would want anything to do with a college dropout / surf rat who was scraping together a landscaping business.
    I didn’t think a man who could have taken home his pick of anyone with two X chromosomes would find me even remotely attractive.
    Last night he put his gentle hand over our baby, an umbrella. “I thought talking about the baby was bad luck.”
    It was. Or, at least, it always had been, to me. But we were so close to making it to the finish line. This was so real. What could possibly go wrong? “Well,” I said, “I changed my mind.”
    “Okay, then. Elspeth,” Max said. “After my favorite aunt.”
    “Please tell me you’re making that up . . .”
    He laughed. “I have another aunt named Ermintrude—”
    “Hannah,” I countered. “Stella. Sage.”
    “That’s a spice,” Max said.
    “Yeah, but not like Ground Cloves. It’s pretty.”
    He leaned over my belly and pressed his ear against it. “Let’s ask her what she wants to be called,” Max suggested. “I think . . . wait . . . no, hang on, she’s coming in loud and clear.” He looked up at me, his cheek still against our baby. “Bertha,” he pronounced.
    The baby, as if to comment, gave his jaw a swift kick; and I was sure at the time that this meant she was fine. That it hadn’t been bad luck at all.
    I am being turned inside out; I am falling through blades. I have never felt so much agony, as if the pain is trapped under my skin, and trying desperately to slice its way out.
    “It’s going to be all right,” Max says, clasping my hand as if we are about to arm-wrestle. I wonder when he arrived. I wonder why he is lying to me.
    His face is as white as a midnight moon, and, even though he’s only inches away, I can barely see him. Instead, there is a blur of doctors and nurses crowded into the tiny delivery room. An IV is fed into my arm. A band is wrapped around my belly and hooked up to a fetal monitor.
    “I’m only twenty-eight weeks,” I pant.
    “We know, honey,” a nurse says, and she turns her attention to the medical