Excerpt from All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Pretty good. I'm seeing a doctor and a midwife this time, to cover all my bases. The midwife is great. Very focused on staying healthy and tuning in to my body."

"Whatever makes you feel good. And I'm glad you're seeing a midwife."

Veronica cocked an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Don't look so surprised. Matt might be a doctor, but I think women-and midwives are all women, right?-know a lot more about childbirth than men. Even the doctors."

"You sure I can't entice you to join the Union?"

Patty rolled her eyes at the mention of her friend's radical feminist club. The women of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union didn't shave their legs, and she'd heard they were even proponents of abortion. Patty was all for birth control, despite what some of her more conservative friends at St. Thomas thought. For heaven's sake, preventing a pregnancy was certainly better than the alternative. "I draw the line at the Junior League."

They laughed together, an acknowledgment that they could have a sense of humor about where their similar views ended. Fizzy as this moment of shared confidence made her, Patty couldn't shake the sense that there was something else Veronica wasn't telling her about why she'd been so busy lately.

Still, Veronica's surprise news changed the whole mood of the night. In between snippets of conversation and serving and clearing dinner, Patty imagined fun games for a baby shower. She'd have to reach out to Veronica's friend Siobhan to see if she wanted to throw it together with her, which she wished she didn't have to do, because Siobhan was such an enigma. She was a painter whose pictures Patty found hard to decipher, and she was divorced from that lovely man Gabe, Charlie's father. Why are they divorced? Patty often wondered. Why put your kid through the ringer like that unless it was absolutely necessary? It didn't appear to have been necessary; Siobhan herself had once said, "No one cheated." And Veronica had refused to tell Patty what had happened, which really annoyed her; they used to love sharing other friends' secrets while holding each other's tight. But now Veronica apparently felt that Siobhan's secrets were worth keeping.

Excerpted from All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher. Copyright © 2023 by Kerri Maher. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.