Natalie—beautiful, childless, twenty-five-year-old Natalie—squeezed his hand. She cast a look in my direction that wasn’t quite pity and wasn’t quite triumph. It was worse. It was relief.

“I’m sorry, Em,” she said. And the nickname she’d called me since we were kids playing in the mud felt like acid poured into my ears. “But we’re in love. We have been for months.”

The room was so quiet I could hear the antique grandfather clock ticking in the corner. Tick. Tock. Counting down the seconds of my humiliation. Thirty women who had come to celebrate the impending arrival of my first child now sat frozen, teacups halfway to their mouths, watching my husband walk out on me at my own baby shower.