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Liam‘s a big brother, that means… It took longer than Dean would like to admit, but suffice it to say that before the night was over he was made to understand that he was going to have another child.
    Dean was psyched. He‘d been psyched when I thought I was pregnant in Scotland, and he was happy now. I mean, neither Dean nor I had an extreme reaction to the news. It wasn‘t ―Oh, shit! or ―Oh, yes! We had always talked about wanting a boy and a girl. Of course any baby is a blessing, but we discussed how many boy babies we‘d have before we‘d stop trying for a girl. Dean had read about spinning sperm to try for the gender you want. A lot of people might look down on this, but we talked about whether we‘d feel comfortable doing it. Was it messing with nature? Would it feel weird? We thought when Liam was a year and a half we‘d talk to a doctor about what the research showed about spinning. Or we could see what the old wives‘ tales said about timing and positions. When I got pregnant without looking into any of the girl planning, I immediately thought, Oh, okay, I guess I’m going to have a boy.
     
    Dean had his son Jack from his first marriage. We had Liam. I just thought, Dean shoots boys. No part of me thought I would naturally have a girl.
    Come January I was three months pregnant and we were ready to share our good news. But my life is not entirely my own. I lost the baby weight for my image, and now I had to keep my pregnancy under wraps for business reasons. My book sTORI telling was due to be published in March. My publicist said that if we announced or acknowledged my pregnancy beforehand, then all the magazines would run big pieces about me. If they ran big pieces about me now, then when the book came out they‘d all say, ―Oh, we just had Tori on our cover. We can‘t do that again. So my ―team decided that I had to do everything I could to hide my rapidly growing belly from the media until the book came out. By then I‘d be five months pregnant!
    Luckily, right before I got pregnant, a company in New York called Porter showed me a beautiful black cashmere coat.
    It was heavy and thick and hit me just above the knee. They said they wanted to give it to me. I didn‘t think I‘d ever have a chance to wear a cashmere coat in Los Angeles, but it was chilly in New York on that trip and the coat was so gorgeous. Long story short, I did not turn it down. Thank God it was fall and thank God for that coat. When my belly needed hiding, which was almost instantly, the cashmere coat became my personal paparazzi shield. When I put it on, my blossoming pregnancy disappeared. Now you see it, now you don‘t. There were heat waves that fall, but no matter how hot it got or what the occasion, I was wearing that same cashmere coat.
    I loved being pregnant, but I hated hiding it (especially when it meant feeling like a walking furnace). The longer I waited, the more I wanted to tell people. I wanted to wear a tank top, have my belly show, and be proud. I wanted to share my good news. It was joyful. Hiding it made me feel like my life was not my own. But as the magazines began to speculate about whether I was pregnant (―Is she or isn‘t she?), keeping it a secret started to be about more than timing the announcement for the book. It was about my privacy. I started to feel that choosing how, where, and when the news came out was the way to make my life my own again.
    So little in my life is private. The press quickly reveals whatever we don‘t disclose in the reality show. The pregnancy became the one thing that I could hold on to and have for just me, Dean, and the close friends we told. I wanted to tell people when I wanted to tell them, instead of having Access Hollywood suspect and confirm it. Why should they or any other news magazine get to choose when and how to announce something so intimate? It was so weird to have those magazines calling to say, ―Can you just confirm your pregnancy so we can