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But he was nonetheless invited to fly at night with them in the bombing of Nuremberg.

It was another week, toward the end of February, when Kate herself began to panic. She had seen Joe eight weeks before, and she had suspected it at first, and been certain for the past month. She was pregnant. It had happened in Washington when he came home to be decorated at the White House. She had no idea what to do about it, and she didn't want to tell her parents. She had gotten the name of a doctor in Mattapan from one of the girls at school, pretending it was for a friend of hers, but she couldn't make herself call him.

She knew it would ruin everything if she had a baby now. She'd have to leave school, and it would scandalize everyone, and even if they wanted to, they couldn't get married. Joe had told her recently that he had no hope of coming home on leave anytime soon, and she hadn't told him why she had asked. She just told him that she missed him. But she would never have wanted to force him to marry her, or even ask him to.

But she also knew that if she had an abortion, and something happened to him, she would never forgive herself. Married or not, she would want the baby. Rather than making a decision about it, she was letting time pass, and eventually she knew it would be too late to end it. But she hadn't even begun to think of what she would say to her parents after that, or her embarrassment, when she explained her circumstances to school.

Andy dropped by to see her in the dining room one night, and asked if she had the flu.

Everyone at Harvard had been sick, and he thought she looked ill. She had been violently nauseous since early January, and it was nearly the first of March. She had almost decided to go ahead with the pregnancy by then, she knew she couldn't do otherwise, and in truth she wanted it. It was Joe's baby. She was going to wait to tell her parents until she had no other choice. She also figured that if it showed by Easter, she'd have to drop out of school by then.

She would have liked to hold out till June and finish her sophomore year, and she could have come back to school in the fall right after she had the baby. But by June, when vacation would begin, she'd be nearly six months pregnant, and there would be no way she could hide it. Sooner or later, she was going to have to face the music. The only amazing thing, as far as Kate was concerned, was that her mother didn't suspect a thing.