Excerpt from The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When I came to rest, a smallness deep within me kept on turning. I felt it. It was a silent trill of something like a sound. It was the smallest key, spinning in a lock I'd never known was present at my center.

The movement was in me, but it wasn't me. It was another little something, a someone, willfully choosing to flex his flippery future arms, or whatever it was he had by then. It was a choice, but I hadn't made it. It was inside me, and mine, but I did not control it.

Right exactly then, my son started. He became real in ways he hadn't been five seconds before. Much realer than he had been almost four months back, when I was cleaning up my hotel room in Atlanta, finding only one used condom but remembering two sexes. A second condom had been on the bedside table, speaking to good intentions but still mint-in- package. Now I could feel him making small decisions inside me, and I already knew his name. It was a nerd reference so obscure that nobody but me would ever get it.

"Hello, Digby? Is that you?" I asked him, listening in that same odd, inward way for a sound that was not a sound. It came again, as if in response. Alien and tiny, unfeelable under any other circumstances.

"Oh, my stars and garters, you're really there," I told him, though Late Bloomers said he was a few weeks away from hearing yet.

Quickening, my book had called it, and it was the perfect word, because when he quickened, my whole life sped up, too. I was pregnant, and this baby didn't even have a crib. Right now he had only me. I had to tell people. My Tuesday gamers ran a meal train every time someone had a baby or got sick. I'd made umpty casseroles and quarts of soup over the years; now I would need a turn.

Most important, I had to tell my family. Fast. My parents needed time to get over their initial shock before the baby came, so Mom could teach me to breast-feed and Keith could show me how to properly install the car seat that I didn't own yet.

Every Sunday afternoon Rachel hosted a family luncheon after church. I'd sat through more than a dozen since I'd gotten pregnant, eating shrimp scampi or beef medallions for two and keeping my mouth shut. This Sunday, I resolved, I would simply say it.

Something sure smells good, and hey, I'm spawning. Boom and done.

I'd pre-forgive Mom and Keith for any less-than- ideal initial reactions. They were going to be so embarrassed. I'd bright-side it for them, reassure them that I was healthy and happy and remind them that they were finally getting a second grandkid. In the end they weren't going to love Digby any less for being fatherless or browner than they were. But the end seemed a long way off.

Rachel would back me up, but the minute we were alone, I'd get an earful from her, too. She'd be pissed at me for setting a bad example for her thirteen-year- old daughter. So would her husband, probably, but screw him. Of every jackass currently stomping around on this blue planet, Jake Jacoby was the last one who was allowed to have an opinion about me.

I'd eat whatever crap they needed to shovel at me, and then they'd rally around me. Around us. They had to, especially with Rachel there to make them. Rachel could rally so fast and so hard, and I had to be ready for that, too. Before Sunday I needed to go online and order everything I wanted for a bright blue Superman-themed nursery, before Rachel could swoop in with trendy neutrals and distressed wood and those horrifying Swedish animals from GOOP.

Sunday night I'd call my grandmother down in Alabama. If Birchie had been any other small-town ninety-year- old southern lady, the thought of telling her might make me cringe, but she was her singular self. Sure, Birchie lived stiffly, and by rules, but they were rules of her own making. That call seemed more like a reward I'd earn by weathering the storm of telling Rachel and my parents.

Excerpted from The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson. Copyright © 2017 by Joshilyn Jackson. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.