Thanks to everyone who left a review for Chapter 1. They're all much appreciated. Many thanks also to my betas, Jan, Barbara, and Alison.

Chapter 2

After the pregnancy test came back positive, Lizzy and Will floated along for a long eleven weeks in an excited fog(1). Lizzy hummed her way through cocktail parties at Will's club and other tedious social events that normally would have set her teeth on edge. The stolen glances and secret smiles she shared with him fortified her against the banal conversation of society matrons. They waited to tell anyone except Jane and Charlie until they got the fetal test results back during the twelfth week. Fortunately, everything was normal.

Will became obsessed with looking at photos of fetal gestation and for some reason developed a scale for describing the size of the baby that compared it primarily to citrus fruit. "This week it's the size of a lemon seed!" "This week it's the size of a small lime!" He eagerly went with her to the doctor's office to see the ultrasounds of the baby. If he had had his way, they would have had a few extra ultrasounds or maybe even bought themselves their very own ultrasound machine so they could take pictures any time they felt like it. But that seemed a little too crazy and Tom Cruise-ish in the end so he settled for just the standard couple of ultrasounds. The OB/Gyn recommended limiting them since nobody knew what the effects might be on the baby.

Jane was ecstatic when she heard the news. She gave Lizzy all of her pregnancy books and sent her links to her favorite childbirth and pregnancy websites: naturalbaby. com, organicmom. com, organicbaby. com, and yourinnergoddess. com. Lizzy gobbled all of them up, usually while she was on the elliptical trainer in the exercise room at home. She also read all the parenting magazines she could find. She even secretly read some of the books that Jane told her to avoid, like What To Expect When You're Expecting, which Jane said should actually be entitled Don't Do That Or You Will Accidentally Kill Your Baby. Jane had a lot of strong opinions about these things, the result of her expertise in child development. And, she was putting it all to good use herself with both of her beautiful little boys.

Lizzy liked the certainty with which Jane talked about this stuff because she, herself, felt quite out of her element. It was nice to have such an informed consultant, an expert on all baby-related matters, who could tell her the right things to do. She was used to using consultants. Outside expertise was always a good thing when you didn't have the skills in-house.

Once the first trimester was over and they had begun to share the news with friends and family, and, of course, Lizzy's boss, Lizzy and Will started planning for the baby's arrival in earnest. It was all like a really complex work project, Lizzy thought, and you could deal with it if you broke it down into manageable pieces. Will set up a very complicated spreadsheet showing all the different tasks they needed to complete by what date: setting up a nursery, hiring a nanny, buying a car seat, getting on the waiting list of the preschool at the Renwick Preparatory Academy for Boys and Girls...She argued for a less snooty school with some diversity and families from all different walks of life, but he wouldn't hear of it. Fitzwilliams had always gone to Renwick, and anyway there were security issues. She sighed and acquiesced.

At 16 weeks, following an amniocentesis that the doctor ordered because of Lizzy's supposedly advanced maternal age, Lizzy and Will were both thrilled to find out that the baby was a girl, even though they would have been just as ecstatic if it had been a boy. They spent hours reading baby name books and finally agreed on one that they both liked: Emma. Later they found out that about one in five girls in the Upper East Side was named Emma, but by then they didn't care because the name was special to them.

Then they had a long negotiation about the rest of her name. Bennet-Darcy? Darcy-Bennet? Which should go first? Anyway they both sounded stupid. What about combining their last names: Darnet? Benarcy? That sounded even stupider. Besides, Will didn't like the idea of the Darcy name disappearing altogether. In the end they agreed on Bennet for the middle name and Darcy for the last name. It turned out the family name wasn't as important to her as she'd originally thought, and anyway Bennet was in there somewhere.

Overall, it was an uneventful, healthy and rather easy pregnancy. Lizzy hadn't felt too sick the first trimester, and now she felt pretty good during the second. With Jane's help, she bought a series of new, chic suits as her tummy got bigger. She gained about 35 pounds, which was a little more than what her OB-Gyn, Dr. Dasgupta, told her was ideal. She wasn't too worried because she figured she'd be able to work that off pretty fast with her usual exercise routine after the baby was born. She'd never had a problem with her weight, probably because she was so hyperactive.

Armed with Jane's expertise about how to have a healthy pregnancy, Lizzy felt confident and in control because she knew she was doing the right things. She dutifully avoided eating and drinking all the things the books said to avoid: cold cuts, sushi, caffeine, alcohol, and basically anything that tasted good or was any fun. She couldn't even eat her beloved hot sauce because it gave her heartburn. Will restrained himself from eating the stuff she couldn't have when they had a meal together. One time, though, he came home smelling of wasabi and soy sauce from a sushi lunch. She was so jealous that she made him go back out again in the rain to buy her some unagi and cucumber rolls, which didn't contain any raw fish and so were safe for her to eat.

At the end of March, Lizzy figured she had better break the news to the women lawyers support group before they heard about it somewhere else. She was not exactly looking forward to it. There had been a little bit of a kerfuffle when Vanessa had announced to the group that she was having a baby the previous summer, and Paula had told her that her career was now officially over. Vanessa and Paula seemed to have reached some kind of détente eventually, but Vanessa hadn't been back to the group since her baby's birth in January.

When the group met at their favorite tapas bar, Lizzy ordered a cranberry juice and Audrey, the young single woman, looked at her suspiciously.

"Is there something you want to tell us, Lizzy?" she asked.

"Why yes, there is, I'm so glad you asked. I am very, very happy to announce that Will and I are expecting a baby in October."

"Well, I can't say that I'm surprised," said Paula, looking miffed. "But are you sure you want to throw your career away like this?"

"Paula!" protested Janice, and even Audrey looked slightly disturbed. Laura didn't say anything, as usual.

Lizzy took a deep breath and tried to tamp down her anger. She had known this was coming, and she'd prepared a speech especially for the occasion. "Paula, I understand your reaction, but my career is not over, and I'm not throwing anything away. Lots of women are making it work, having kids and successful careers. Please also don't forget that my job doesn't require the same time commitment as the partnership track."

She had thought about Paula's reaction a lot since the blowup with Vanessa. She didn't think that the problem was as simple as Paula's being a huge ass, because really she wasn't. In fact, she was very supportive of other women, and a good mentor for younger men, too. She just seemed to have some kind of a blind spot on this subject, although Lizzy didn't want to assume too much about why. She decided to ask.

Gently, she said, "So, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about why you're so sure that babies spell the end of it all."

"I've just seen it happen so many times in the last thirty years. Mothers cut back on hours, they don't make partner, they walk away because it's too hard." Paula sounded really angry about this.

Janice interjected, "What about all the innovations in maternity leave policies and part-time work during the early childhood years? I think they've been having a profound impact in the last decade or so. More women are making partner than ever before, even women with children."

Paula had cooled off a little while listening to Janice. "I guess that's true, in spite of the problems the 'mommy track' creates. We just worked so hard for women to get a seat at the table in the first place. It's tough to see the younger women reject that, and not only accept but ask for this secondary position."

"Well, I see what you mean," soothed Lizzy. "But thanks to the women who came before us, I think we do have more choices now, and that's good, right?"

"Yeah, it's good. When I started out, you really had to choose one or the other, career or family. There was no way to do both," Paula said. She didn't look regretful, although she did look, for lack of a better word, sad.

It suddenly dawned on Lizzy that part of what Paula was struggling with in all of this was that, maybe unconsciously, she saw the younger women's decisions as saying her hard work opening doors for them hadn't been useful or valuable. And, she also saw it as a criticism of her own choices long ago. Paula really loved the law—you could hear it in how she talked about it. But in her generation, it had been pretty much impossible to reject the stark either/or choice, and she'd loved being a lawyer so much that the right path was obvious. If things had been different, maybe she would have wanted to have kids. But then again, maybe not. Perhaps, Lizzy thought, Paula thought that the younger women were telling her that if only she had tried harder, she could have made it work, too, had it all, even though they all knew that hadn't, as a rule, been true then.

Lizzy put her hand on Paula's on the table. "Hey, don't worry. I'll be back. I won't let you down."

Paula smiled back at her, again a little sadly. "You couldn't, really. I'm already so proud of all of you."

Soon after, during one of their frequent phone calls, Jane told Lizzy that whether she liked it or not, she had to have a baby shower. Lizzy protested, saying she didn't have time, and anyway, she and Will could buy whatever they needed on their own.

Jane said, "No! Other people will want to give you presents, and you have to let them. It's all part of a community-building process. And you have to sign up for a baby registry, too."

Lizzy protested that she would feel like a jerk making a list of stuff for other people to buy for them, when there really wasn't anything she needed. They had had this same conversation about a wedding registry a few years before.

Again Jane said, "No! People want guidance about what to buy. It makes things easier for them. And anyway, you can't even imagine what they will give you if you don't tell them what you want," she shuddered.

So Lizzy and Will sat down at their place one Saturday afternoon with Jane to look at a high-end baby store website and set up a registry. Aiden and Tyler played quietly on the living room carpet while the adults stared at the laptop sitting on the coffee table. After a while, Jane put Tyler down for a nap in his pack-and-play, and not long after that Aiden went down for his nap on Lizzy's and Will's bed.

Jane helped them tick off all the things that they would need in order to have a happy, healthy, and, most importantly, safe baby. Apparently it required a million gadgets and gizmos, and all of them had to be organic, unbleached, non-toxic, and safety-rated. No plastic toys! Ever! Any unavoidable plastic had to be proven phthalate-free.

"Seriously?" protested Lizzy. "We have to have an organic, unbleached cotton papasan swing with a five-point harness? And two different kinds of baby slings and three nursing capes? Isn't this all a little excessive?"

But Jane insisted that every bit of it was vitally necessary. She didn't want some horrible polyester blend swing cover to give her baby's delicate skin a rash, right? When he heard that, Will had to agree. So Lizzy gave in because she knew she'd lose a fight about this anyway.

"Oh, before I forget," Jane said, "you'll need to sign up with a diaper service. You can't use disposable diapers. They're bad for the environment, and they're bad for the baby's skin, too. Dioxins." Will made a note on the legal pad.

"Also," Jane said, "after you choose a theme for the baby's room, then we can register you for furnishings and that kind of thing."

Lizzy wasn't really sure what she meant by furnishings. Was that the same as furniture?

Before she got too far down that unproductive line of thought, Will nodded and said, "OK, we'll get the interior decorator to take care of that."

"We will?" Lizzy was surprised. She didn't remember having discussed this.

"Yeah, of course. We can't do that ourselves. I'll text Ahmed right now and ask him to make an appointment with Sherry." Will pulled out his iPhone and started texting his super-efficient PA.

Lizzy didn't know or care about interior decorating and normally would have been fine with letting a professional deal with it. But the baby's room felt a little different somehow, special, not like the dining room or something. It wasn't that she'd ever dreamed about decorating a baby's room, but just handing this off to someone? Really?

"Now, wait a second. Let's talk about this," she said, just as Will hit send.

"What? She'll take care of everything. Probably we'll just have to choose a color or something. That's all I had to do when I re-did this place. It was easy."

Lizzy decided to let it go. She was too busy for a project like that, and basically she didn't care, anyway. "OK, you and Sherry can work it out." She paused, briefly imagining what over-the-top girly scheme Will would come up with in his current mood. "Only, no pink. It's oppressive. And no princesses."

Jane, who had been observing the back-and-forth with some interest and amusement, chose to break in here. "Right, something gender-neutral is a good idea. There are some really nice sea-foam greens out this year. That's a good choice. It's soothing, helps the baby sleep peacefully."

Lizzy rolled her eyes when she heard "sea-foam green" because that was treading dangerously close to totally-don't-give-a-crap design territory.

"OK, then! Is that it?" Lizzy was ready to wrap things up. She had stuff to do, illegally imprisoned people to get out of jail.

"Oh, wait!" said Will. He had just noticed the special occasion dresses section of the website. "Oh! That looks just like a little dress Georgie used to have..." he sighed.

"She'll look like a Madame Alexander doll in that, Will," said Lizzy sardonically. She was amused by his sudden obsession with a red velvet dress with big black bows on it.

"No, it's not very practical, either," said Jane. "But maybe for something special. Christmas, maybe? Let's make sure we get the right size for Christmas."

Will nodded happily and they added it to the list, along with several others that he found he couldn't possibly live without. Lizzy snickered.

Finally Jane said, "OK, we're almost done. But there are two really significant purchases that you need to think very hard about. It's important to get these right. One, a stroller-car seat combo, and two, a breast pump."

Will got a funny expression on his face when he heard the last part. On the one hand, he sort of perked up a little, but then he simultaneously looked somewhat disturbed and slightly grossed out.

Lizzy laughed at him. "What's that face for, sweetie?"

Jane laughed, too. "I've seen that look on Charlie before. It's the combination of 'breast' and 'pump' that worries them. Don't worry, he'll get used to it."

"Oh, I see. Breast equals awesome, pump equals sinister and dangerous, right?" Lizzy teased.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Will deadpanned.

They settled on the very expensive pump that came in a professional-looking briefcase, and moved along to the strollers and car seats. Jane explained all about them.

"Taking into consideration safety ratings, ease of use, cargo space, and design, I recommend the Ellipse. What I particularly like about it for you guys is that it's great for an urban family. The car seat base is super easy to install and pop out, so you can get into and out of a taxi in a flash."

This was all completely over Lizzy's head, so she said, "Yeah, OK," and Will agreed more enthusiastically.

Jane clicked on the bassinet attachment and all the other absolutely essential stroller accessories, and it all added up to almost $3000, plus tax.

"Holy fucking shit!" cried Lizzy. "Three thousand dollars for a stroller?" After all this time with Will, she still found this kind of thing hard to deal with. It was too much.

"Lizzy!" Jane admonished. "Not in front of the kids," even though they were both asleep.

"Sorry..." Lizzy clamped her hand over her mouth.

Will said, "I don't know. Sounds reasonable to me, if it's good and it's got all the stuff we need."

Lizzy completely threw in the towel then. Moderation and restraint were clearly lost on these two nutcases with baby fever.

The baby shower was at Jane and Charlie's place in Westchester on a Sunday afternoon in July. She insisted that they not have it at Lizzy and Will's place because that would be tacky, even though most of their friends lived in the city so Westchester wasn't convenient for them at all.

In turn, Lizzy insisted that it be a co-ed shower, and she also insisted that there be no stupid games where you had to name baby animals or humiliating displays involving her growing stomach.

The attendees were an interesting cross-section of Lizzy and Will's lives in New York. Some of her friends from Columbia were there, as were a couple of her friends and classmates from Yale who were now living in New York. One of the other junior associates she had known at DeWitt came, as did most of the women from her women lawyers support group: Vanessa was there with her 6-month-old, and even Paula showed up, to Lizzy's mild surprise. Carla and Valerie, the wives of men from Will's athletic club, women she'd become friendly with when the couples socialized periodically, also attended.

Lydia and her older girlfriend Susanna, who lived together in the city, came, too, but both Mary and Lillian stayed home. They both said it was too far to travel from Artemis and Rochester, respectively, for only one afternoon. Aunt Maddie came in from Boston, although she didn't bring the girls. Donna, the director of the women's shelter where Lizzy had volunteered for years and now sat on the Board of Directors, came, and so did several of the other longtime volunteers. Lizzy's staff assistant, Gina, was there, along with several other staffers from HRI.

Caroline had sent her effusive, flowery, insincere regrets and mailed off an extravagant gift instead. But Louisa Hurst came and sat in the corner unobtrusively with her toddler.

Lizzy didn't really have much of a chance to talk to any of them in depth, but it was great to see all these women in her life in one place.

And it was almost all women. In fact, although it was officially a co-ed shower, Will, Charlie, and Lizzy's second-in-command, Kyle, were the only men who showed up. They sat there shifting uncomfortably in their chairs while the women sighed and oohed and aahed over the gifts as Lizzy unwrapped them on the elegantly appointed patio in Jane's backyard following a beautifully catered lunch.

Lizzy did appreciate the gifts, many of which, while not on the registry, were very thoughtful because they were things that friends said had really helped them with their own babies. Iris, her Yale housemate who was now a biochemist at NYU, said the cute little swaddling wrap had helped her son calm down like nothing else. And Vanessa absolutely swore by the baby hammock she gave them, saying it had saved her sanity more than once.

But what Lizzy appreciated more than that was all the people who came to show their support and their joy. She knew it took a village to raise a kid, and this was her village.

After the shower, Lizzy and Will continued to receive gifts, far too many in Lizzy's opinion. And Jane was right—in spite of the guidance offered by the registry, some people still sent them things that were really, really weird: a child leash, an umbilical cord stub display case, a six-pack of rectal thermometers. One of her distant relatives sent them a whole stack of different sizes of waterproof pads, and another a pack of 50 cotton towel thingies. What the hell were they for? Someone even gave them a nasty little navy blue Baby Bjorn baby carrier. Those things were just awful. Thank goodness most other people had stuck to the list. Lizzy and Will amused themselves with a game wherein they tried to guess how you were supposed to use half of the stuff. It's a flotation device! It's a hat! Oh, it's a nursing pillow.

Lizzy almost busted a gut laughing when not one, not two, but three of Will's great aunts sent them engraved silver spoons.

As a result of all this largesse, and also after repeated visits from Sherry the interior designer and her in-house painter, they had the nursery all ready to go with plenty of time to spare. It was a nice gender-neutral pale green and yellow. Jane came by to see it and was really pleased with the calming atmosphere. She said that the baby would sleep and sleep and sleep in this beautiful calm environment.

All the gifts meant a whole lot of thank-you cards to be sent. When Lizzy and Will sat down at the breakfast nook table with a huge stack all ready to be written, Will complained, "Can't we just have Ahmed write them, or print them out or something, and then we can sign them?"

Lizzy was not her mother's daughter for nothing. "What? No! Be serious. You wanted all this stuff, and now you have to pay the price. I'm writing half, and you're writing half. Here, take a card. Don't forget to mention what the gift was. Jane made us a list of all the gifts at the shower, and I turned it into a spreadsheet. You do all the odd numbers."

Will grumbled about how it would be so much more efficient just to do a form letter with a merge where you could insert the name and the gift, but he did his half.

Lizzy knew that finding the right nanny was super important, so she had made that a top priority. By week 24, they had engaged a very exclusive nanny agency's services and interviewed candidates. The agency's fees were ridiculously high, but it promised candidates with impeccable credentials, thorough background checks, guaranteed backup care, payroll services, paid vacations and medical insurance for the nanny, and a replacement if things didn't work out. In the end, Lizzy and Will signed a contract with a great woman named Elena Reynaldo who would be ready to start in early December when Lizzy went back to work. Lizzy really liked her because she was a no-nonsense kind of person but also gave off a loving vibe when she was with children. They had observed her interacting with the kids in the family where she currently worked. She would live out, and she would be at their place 8 to 6 Monday through Friday.

Lizzy was committed to having a more reasonable-length workday, so she used Elena's hours to create that limit for herself. Of course she might have to work at night after the baby went to sleep sometimes, but that, she determined, was the price she was willing to pay for having a family life.

"Are you sure you want to wait so long for Elena to start?" asked Will one evening as they were sitting in their big, white living room after dinner. "You know, she could start coming as soon as the baby is born, and help you out with things."

"Like what? Staring at my baby and going all googly-eyed about how beautiful she is?" Lizzy scoffed.

"No, there's a lot to do with a newborn. I remember that from when Georgie was born. Her nanny, Mrs. Martinez, was there right from the start. I'll show you." Lizzy followed him down the hall as he headed to his office in search of family photo albums.

Lizzy and Will sat on the leather sofa in the office to go through the pictures. Sure enough, Mrs. Martinez was in most of the candids of baby Georgie. She was a motherly, round-looking middle-aged woman from Puerto Rico, and she seemed to be holding Georgie in most of the photos. She would have stood out among all the tall, patrician white people around her, except that the photographer so obviously conceived of her as part of the background, rather than the subject, of the photos. Here was her arm holding Georgie, here her shoulder and her ear, here her leg with Georgie hanging onto it.

Lizzy asked, "Are there any photos with all of Mrs. Martinez's face? I can't quite tell what she looks like."

"Oh, I don't know..." Will leafed through the books. "Sorry, I guess not."

"Hmmph."

"What was that for?" Will asked.

"She worked for your family for how long, and you don't have any pictures of her?" Lizzy was incredulous.

Will shrugged. "I don't know, I think she lived with us until Georgie was in middle school. I guess we didn't usually take pictures with the staff."

"Oh, the staff, huh? How many people worked for your family?"

"Well, you know, it was a bigger place than this," Will said defensively. Lizzy smirked, because their apartment had five bedrooms and a huge living room and five and a half baths and a big ballroom off to the side and a home gym and an entertainment room. He continued, "Let's see if I can remember. Well, there was my nanny, Mrs. Llwellyn, but she retired and went back to England when I was about ten."

Lizzy snickered and said, "Oh my God. You had Mary Poppins for a nanny, didn't you?"

Will glared at her and continued, "That was right before Georgie was born. That's when Mrs. Martinez came. We had, um, a housekeeper, Mrs. Morrison, who did most of the cooking and stuff like that. And a driver. Cleaning staff."

Ah, she thought. This explained some things. "What, no butler? No gardener?" she quipped. He really had no idea.

"I see what you're doing here. Of course we didn't have a gardener at our place here in the city. We didn't have a garden. Well, we had a roof garden. Marcus took care of that."

"And who is this Marcus?"

"I don't know his title." He was starting to get a little annoyed with her. "You know, there were various staff members around. Personal assistants and that kind of thing. What's the big deal? I have a PA now."

It was true, Will did have a PA, Ahmed. But Ahmed stayed at the office.

"I'm just curious."

Will knew by now that she was working on something when she said something like that.

He nudged her. "What?"

"You know, I'm just wondering. You told me a long time ago that your mom was a housewife, that she took care of you and your dad and Georgie, right?" She diplomatically did not mention that this discussion had occurred in the middle of the fight that had precipitated their breakup and been a major turning point in making them both rethink their relationship.

"Yeah, that's right."

"Well, I mean, what exactly did she do all day? She didn't clean, or cook, or drive you around, or take care of the baby. Or decorate." Lizzy knew that Will's mom had used the same interior decorator he'd hired to fix up his place when he'd inherited it from his grandmother. "Did she plan parties or events or something?"

Will pondered this question for a while. "No, a social organizer did that, same as I have now." He thought some more. "I think she did some stuff at the Trust. I guess I'm not really sure what she did. That's weird."

"So, is this kind of how you expect our household to run once the baby comes? I just, uh, I don't think I can live like that."

"Oh, I know that. Obviously. We're not running that kind of operation right now, anyway."

"That's true." With just the two of them, eating out or ordering in most of the time, there wasn't that much housework. The building had a cleaning service, and the cleaners came in three times a week. Lizzy had never been at home when they came in, but she could see that they tidied up and vacuumed and cleaned the bathrooms and ran the half-empty dishwasher and so on. They also picked up the bags of dirty laundry and dry cleaning and returned the clean ones.

"Anyway, are you sure you don't want Elena to start earlier? Sure you want to wait till the last minute?"

Lizzy shook her head. "No, I think I can handle it myself. I want to, actually. Unless I'm working, I just don't see the point of having someone take care of the baby. I'm OK with paying someone to clean the house, but paying someone to take care of a kid from day one seems different to me."

"Why is that?"

"A baby is different! It's not like gardening or cleaning, where you just hire someone to do it if you don't feel like doing it yourself."

Will was perplexed "I don't know. I don't see anything wrong with hiring someone to do stuff you don't want to do. You know, problem solved."

"OK, I can see we aren't on the same page here. But anyway, the point is, I want to take care of the baby myself to start with. Those are really important weeks in the bonding process, that's what all the books say. I won't be around as much after I go back to work, so it's especially important to do it right early on. It's what Jane says, too. I just think there are certain things that people should do for themselves. It's what responsible adults do."

"Like what? We already don't do any cooking or cleaning, and you don't seem to mind that."

"It's not that simple," she said, although deep down she knew that he was mostly right about that part, at least. Her position wasn't completely consistent. It was just that anything that smacked of having servants really offended her middle-class sensibilities. "I can't explain it. Anyway, the point is, this is how I want to do it. This is what I feel comfortable with."

He nodded. "OK, if it's important to you, that's what we'll do."

Around week 28, they managed to squeeze in a childbirth class around some trips Will had to take to Copenhagen, where WPD was working out a deal to invest in a new wind power project. The class was at the hospital where they'd give birth, and it took up two whole Saturdays.

At the end of the class, Lizzy had a birth plan all worked out and she was feeling confident that, with the midwives on staff at the hospital, they'd be able to have the kind of childbirth experience that they wanted: classical music, birth ball, epidural only if necessary, lots of walking around, no being tethered to some IV stand or being hooked up to monitors.

Will was ready, too. He had read up on pain management techniques and breathing exercises and all the things he could do to help coach her through the labor and delivery. Unlike some of the other men in the class who had run out of the room to vomit when they saw the birthing documentary, he was not intimidated or frightened. He was looking forward to catching Emma when she was born.

By week 32, they had everything all set and totally under control. Lizzy felt a little bit as though she were all dressed up with nowhere to go, because it was still two months till the due date.

That Saturday evening Lizzy and Will sat together on the sofa in the big white mausoleum-cum-living room looking out at the lights in Central Park.

"Just eight more weeks to go," Lizzy said. "Excited?"

This was a joke between them, because Will was so excited that he sort of vibrated any time anyone mentioned the baby.

He took her hand and laughed softly to himself. "Yeah. Little bit."

"It still doesn't quite feel real to me."

"What do you mean? There she is." He rubbed her swelling tummy.

"Well, I mean, in eight weeks we'll have a real live baby. What's that going to be like?" She felt like she was trying to look down the road leading to the future, but it was foggy and she couldn't make anything out.

"That's right. She'll be a beautiful mix of you and me." His eyes sparkled.

"Let's hope she gets the right parts of both of us. Don't want her to be 6 foot 5 with my knobby knees and work ethic."

Will laughed. "True, but that's not really what I meant. What I meant was, you know, she'll be part of me, and part of you, together, forever." Now she could see that his eyes were sparkling not only with excitement, but also with emotion. Her sentimental husband.

"OK, so, like, our love made manifest or something?" she teased affectionately. She didn't always understand his sentimentality, but she thought it was sweet.

"Yeah, something like that."

Lizzy put her arms around him, rested her head on his chest, and smiled to herself.

"You're going to be such a great dad."

"You, too. A great mom, I mean."

Lizzy snuggled in closer and closed her eyes. She had been feeling a little slower and more tired lately. She drifted off to sleep with the feel of his gentle butterfly kisses on the top of her head. She dreamed of their beautiful angel baby smiling and floating on a soft, puffy cloud before Will stroked her arm to wake her just enough so he could help her stumble, still half asleep, to bed.

Lizzy went full bore at work until the last four weeks or so of her pregnancy. Then she really started to feel it—for the first time in her pregnancy, she was deeply, deeply tired. And also anxious to get on with it, because she was pretty sick of hauling her huge self around like this. She had to stop volunteering weekly at the women's shelter, and sent them a huge boatload of money to make up for it, over and above the boatload she already gave them every month. She ended up asking Kyle, her second-in-command, to take over a couple of projects earlier than expected because she just didn't have the energy. She tried to think of it as a way to transition into her maternity leave.

She also smuggled a pillow and blanket into her office and started taking short mid-afternoon naps under her desk after asking Gina to hold her calls. The biggest problem with this plan was trying to get up afterwards. One day in her 38th week, she found that she could roll or wiggle her way up to a half-kneeling position, but she couldn't stand up no matter how hard she tried. So she shoved her pillow and blanket into her desk's file drawer and called Gina on her cell phone to ask for her help in standing up. She told Gina that she had dropped a pencil under the desk and gotten stuck trying to retrieve it, but she wasn't sure whether Gina believed her. Especially since there was no pencil in sight.

Will decided he wasn't going to take any more business trips out of town during the last month of her pregnancy, just in case. She was glad, just in case.

The week before her due date, Lizzy had lunch with Charlotte at their favorite Greek diner. Lizzy puffed into the restaurant and hauled herself into her chair with all the grace a woman in her 39th week of pregnancy can muster. She was bone-tired. That week she had been rushing to get a few last things finished before she went on leave, making sure Kyle was ready to take over all the projects in progress, delegating future work to various other people, seeing to it that her staff felt ready for her absence. It was driving her crazy that she didn't have any control over when, exactly, the baby would come. It could be in five minutes, or it might be in ten days. Aargh.

Charlotte was, as always, ready to vent as soon as the USS Lizzy had finally managed to dock safely in her berth.

"So my boss, Angela, tells me she has this great idea to help solve the problems of poor women in cities in India who don't have access to toilets. Did you see the article about that in The Times a few weeks ago?"

Lizzy nodded. Angela, the president of the international development non-profit, AmeriCaring, where Charlotte worked, had gotten a lot of harebrained ideas for development projects from reading The New York Times.

"Well, then you know it's a really big problem. You have to pay to use the public toilets, except for the urinals, and a lot of poor women can't afford it, so they hold it all day. Can you imagine?"

"No, especially not right now," she said, pointing to her huge belly. "Be right back." All this talk about peeing had, naturally, given her the urge.

When she came back from the restroom, Charlotte continued,

"So her idea is that we should sell women these special, really cheap plastic bags that they can use wherever and whenever they want. And so I'm like, what are these women going to do with all of the full plastic bags? Environmental catastrophe! And where, exactly, are they going to do all this peeing? This is a country where women are so modest that some toilet projects have failed because the stall doors didn't go all the way to the ground, and women wouldn't use them because their feet showed! God!"

"Charlotte, I know this is really important. But can we please not talk about bodily functions at the table? You know I'm squeamish about that." She scrunched up her nose and made a "bleh" sound.

"I know, I know. You're going to have to get over that soon, you know."

Lizzy shook her head. "Yeah, I don't think so."

Charlotte laughed. She and her husband, Liam, who was a sculptor and earned a living as a manager at a Gap store in Queens, had a 2-year-old daughter named Chloe. "Well, we'll see. Have you ever even changed a diaper?"

"Yes, you know I did, when I babysat in high school."

"Yeah, and I remember how you almost threw up when little Danny's pants—"

Lizzy put up her hand, laughing. "Oh, please, don't, it'll give me flashbacks. Let's change the subject."

"OK, OK. So, you hired a nanny, right?"

"Yup. We hired a great woman named Elena to start when I go back to work."

"And when is that?" Charlotte inquired.

"HRI is giving me eight weeks of paid maternity leave. So, the first week in December. That's the plan."

"Oh, that must be nice." Charlotte sounded a little grumpy about this.

"Umm...?" Lizzy raised her eyebrows questioningly.

Charlotte said dismissively, "I only took six weeks. Anyway, what's the deal with Elena?"

"She's super, really sweet. She had great references, lots of experience, raised three kids of her own. They're grown up now. We agreed that she's only going speak to Emma in Spanish. She's from the Dominican Republic. Did you see that article in The Times about how being bilingual helps kids' brains develop? Plus, it's a real advantage to speak good Spanish in New York."

Charlotte looked at Lizzy speculatively. "You really have no concept of how your life is going to change in a week, do you?"

Lizzy scoffed, "Of course I know it's going to be different. Please!"

"I don't know. It's hard to imagine until you've been through it yourself."

"Don't give me that 'you can't possibly understand' crap, Charlotte. I'm really, really good at time management. I wouldn't be where I am now otherwise. We have a plan. I've got it all worked out. I mean, millions of women do it every year, so it can't be that hard, right?"

Charlotte snapped her mouth shut. Hard. Then she changed the subject. They were old friends, and she knew when it was time to do that.

Lizzy worked up until the day before the due date. Late in the afternoon, she started feeling a little off in a way she couldn't quite describe. She sort of thought this might be it. So, she tied up a few loose ends with Kyle and Gina, and with a couple of other staff members they walked one last time through where important files were, and which projects people would be working on for the next eight weeks or so. They knew it was OK to call if they needed her for anything. She knocked off a little early for the evening, around 5 o'clock. She tidied up her desk, said so long to her staff, and waddled down to the town car that Will had insisted she use for her commute for the last month.

The next morning, very early, Lizzy went into labor. Will drove her to the hospital, where they might as well have just torn up the birth plan because nothing went as they intended. She narrowly avoided having a C-section, and had to give up on the idea of a drug-free birth when Emma got stuck for a while during the pushing phase. There was no classical music, there were loads of fetal monitors, and what with all the medical interventions, Will was reduced to being a passive bystander for the last few hours except for reaching around through tubes and wires to hold Lizzy's hand while she pushed. He didn't even get to catch Emma because the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. But about 20 hours after the whole thing started, Emma was born, 8 pounds 14 ounces, healthy, and screaming at the top of her lungs.

And that was the end of life as they knew it.

Footnotes:

(1) In the US, a series of prenatal screening tests are usually given near the end of the first trimester of pregnancy, somewhere between 9 and 13 weeks. In addition, Americans are told that the risk of miscarriage decreases significantly after the 12th week. Because of this, many couples choose not to share news of a pregnancy until after the 12th week, in other words at the beginning of the second trimester.

If you feel so inclined, please let me know how unprepared for the realities of parenthood you think Lizzy and Will are. I always love to hear from you.