My Sister Announced Her Pregnancy at My Wedding.

The reception was in a barn with fairy lights and a hired band, and it had cost almost exactly what Amara had saved in four years, which she had told nobody, because a wedding is the one purchase in life that everyone feels entitled to have an opinion about.

Her sister Cass took the microphone during the toasts, which she had not been scheduled to do. She was wearing the champagne colour. She had asked, in March, what the bridesmaids were wearing, and had then not been a bridesmaid, which had been a small problem that everybody had agreed not to discuss.

Cass spoke warmly about growing up together, and about how Amara had always been the one who did things properly, and then she said that she had a piece of news, and that she hoped her sister would be happy for her, because it was going to be a busy year.

Then she said she was pregnant.

The barn made the sound a room makes when four hundred people decide at the same moment not to react.

Amara’s husband dropped his glass.

It was not a nudge, or a slip. It was the release of a hand that had stopped working, from a man standing at the end of the top table who had gone the colour of the tablecloth, and the glass broke on the flagstones and the band stopped playing because they had been given a signal and they were professionals.