“Laura, we need to take her to the emergency room right now,” he said.

And instead of fear, all the suspicion I had been nursing for weeks erupted out of me at once, in the ugliest words I have ever spoken.

“Mom, what are you hiding from us?” I demanded, my voice bouncing off the bathroom tile.

She lifted her pale, sweat-damp face and looked at me in confusion, and I pointed at her rounded belly and I said it.

“That.