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and abused children in the world, every last one of them, before they tried to force others to bear children they might not be equipped to care for physically or emotionally.
    She still believed a woman should have the right to govern her own body, to choose whether or not to become a mother. But in the wee-est hours of the morning as she stared out her living room window watching the sun steal up behind the buildings to fill the cracks and spaces of the city with light, she also knew that she couldn’t give up anything that she and Stone had created together. Even if she were unemployed and alone.
    So she made an appointment with her new ob-gyn, a smart, no-nonsense woman named Myra Grable, who gave her a prescription for prenatal vitamins, suggested she buy a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting , explained the added risks that came with a pregnancy at her age, and promised that the nausea and exhaustion would pass.
    But Dr. Grable didn’t tell Vivien how to tell Stone he was going to be a father. Or where she might find the energy to go out and look for a new job. Or how she was going to go back on camera, assuming she could even find a job like the one she’d left, while her body swelled and she remained unmarried. Hollywood celebrities seemed to do these things with impunity, but Vivien didn’t know any television journalists who’d reported during unmarried pregnancies. So far she looked the same as always. But what would happen when her body began to change?
    “Why did you quit? It’s so much easier to find another job when you’ve already got one.” Stone and pretty much every member of her family asked her that question in the following weeks, but it was almost impossible to answer. Because how could she describe the torrent of emotions that had propelled her to that scene with Dan when she wasn’t ready to admit that the torrent was hormone-induced? That she was pregnant. And completely freaked out about it.
    Her family would disapprove. And Stone? Stone, whom she had affectionately nicknamed Rolling Stone because of his love of rock ’n’ roll and the joy with which he raced from story to story and war to war. He’d told her more than once that he loved her. It was possible he might marry her, might well offer to do “the right thing.” But she wasn’t even sure she believed in marriage anymore. She didn’t understand how in the world her parents had stayed married for so long. And at forty-one, most of her friends’ first marriages were already over. Did she want to marry someone to whom she was first and foremost a responsibility? It was the one thing that might make her feel even more pathetic than she already did.
    Finally, when her cozy hidey-hole began to feel too small and her wallowing had produced no answers, she was forced to concede that no one was going to call and offer her a job. So she got up early on that Wednesday morning, took a shower, got dressed, and spent the day at the kitchen table first making a list of who to approach, then working the phone to set up appointments.
    By early afternoon she wanted to crawl back into her cocoon on the couch. She’d only been granted three face-to-face interviews because “people were cutting back.” “There was so much wrong out there that investigative pieces just didn’t break through the public malaise as they once had.” And though no one came out and said so, because she was forty-one and the first thing that sprang to mind when she said her name was no longer “inside scoop,” but “bullet in butt.”
    Still Vivien dressed carefully for the first interview. Her clothes were already snugger in the waist and bust, but even she wouldn’t have known she was pregnant if she hadn’t been forced to know. When she walked into CIN’s rival, CCN, she felt cautiously optimistic because, after all, who in New York had more experience at investigative reporting than she did?
    But when she was seated in the news director’s