It's been this hilariously open secret that Dad and Katie have been together for, I don't know, years now. Eleanor, before she went off to boarding school last year (she's got accepted on some kind of Eleanor-invented fast track and is going to be a lawyer by the time she's seventeen or something: it may not take till she's fifty to become president), asked them why they didn't just get married and get it over with? Or at least move in together. Poor Eleanor — if "poor" and "Eleanor" can ever be combined — had the worst of it. She'd got Martha and me out of her hair but here was her mom still hopelessly soppy and silly with my dad — and pretending it didn't show.

"They just told me that it was their business and not mine," she said disgustedly to Martha and me. "You see if you can do anything with them while I'm gone. I don't get it — all those secrets when Lois was a baby, you'd think they'd be glad not to have a secret that they don't, you know, have to have." (I'm hoping Eleanor will keep this attitude. Think of it: a president whose default position is not "whatever we do don't tell the voters." Can the country stand it? Stay tuned.)

So this was terrific news. We were still celebrating, and Martha had got out the cranberry juice to put in the champagne glasses because she wasn't drinking because of the baby, but since it was the middle of the afternoon we thought maybe no one would think about it being cranberry juice, and it's not like we had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator waiting for a major announcement either. But we'd just made the first toast when Martha said, "So, okay, is there a reason you've finally decided to get married now and not two or three years ago?"

And the two of them looked at each other as guiltily and sheepishly as, well, teenagers, and then Dad said, "Well — Katie — "

And Katie said, "I'm pregnant," at exactly the same moment as Martha said, "You're pregnant," and then Martha and I started laughing and couldn't stop, and Dad and Katie were obviously relieved, but they were also a bit puzzled till Martha finally gasped out, "So am I!"

So then the fun really began because Martha told Katie about her idea about the birth at Dragon Central and Katie thought it was a great idea and wanted to do the same, and then Dad started behaving in a way that made the way I'd been behaving look restrained, which isn't entirely surprising because while Katie was completely healthy and had popped out her two previous daughters with no particular effort, from what she said less drama than most women have to put in, she was now forty-six and so automatically on all the high-risk lists, and Dad wasn't having any. She'd have that baby in a hospital like a normal twenty-first century first-world woman, and there was no argument.

Oh yes there was an argument. Martha and I were so fascinated we almost forgot to keep arguing ourselves. So pretty much within a day or two all of Smokehill knew that (a) Dad and Katie were getting married, (b) Katie was pregnant, (c) Martha was pregnant, (d) Katie and Martha wanted to have their babies at Dragon Central, (e) and the dads concerned were AGAINST this. Soap opera with dragons? You never saw anything like it.

I don't know how Dad really felt — we didn't dare talk about it, we might implode and there'd be a black sucking hole into a parallel universe where two generations of Mendoza men used to be — but he never said This is all YOUR fault although he must have thought it. I thought it. I could almost have done the black hole thing alone. Of course our baby should be born with dragons around. It was the obvious right thing to happen. And it was mean and horrible and two-faced and disloyal and treacherous of me to be trying to make something else happen instead.

But how could we risk it? (What had Gulp been risking? Was the sixth blob — was my dragonlet dangerously tainted or weakened by its contact with me?) And Katie was part of my family no matter whose sibling her new kid was going to be. But the dragons were a part of my family too, and the ties were . . . they weren't even unbreakable. They weren't even ties. They were a part of ME like my ear or my pancreas was a part of me. Like Martha was a part of me. The way the question kept presenting itself to me was, Who was I going to betray?

It was nearly getting to the point that the newlyweds and the almost-newlyweds weren't on speaking terms which would have been funny if it hadn't been us. And then Grace said softly into one of those dinner conversations that were only not getting loud and nasty through violent self-control of parties concerned, "Jamie married a midwife, you know."

Dead silence.

"Sadie's a midwife?" I said finally.

"You could see what she says — ask her advice."

What she said, of course, was "You're all nuts." But she still agreed to fly out and talk to us in person. Which was amazingly nice of her. Although I had the impression she hadn't decided whether to laugh or to bring a cattle prod to keep us at a safe distance. Maybe both. She'd only ever met any of us once, four years ago, on their way from Boston where they got married to their honeymoon in Hawaii — and they'd stayed here in Jamie's old bedroom, which was still a bit redolent of Lois despite a fresh paint job in the bride's honor. So she had a little idea of what she was getting into, and she came anyway.

It was my idea to take her straight out to Farcamp and Dragon Central and let her meet, uh, some dragons. Everyone else was still saying "hello." I was like at the end of my tether and starting to get rope burns.

She looked from face to face and said hesitantly, "Farcamp?"

I said, "Farcamp is where the humans stay when we want to spend time with the dragons. Dragon — er — Central is — er — next door."

She blinked maybe twice and said, "Okay."

But I knew that as soon as we all went to Dragon Central and I actually tried to tell my dragons what was going on, or at least finally let them pick up what I'd been trying to hide, they'd have to know how much I both did and didn't want. . . . My stomach hurt. The old scars throbbed, and the inside felt like someone had tried to light me up, mistaking me for a dragonlet with an igniventator.

Sadie didn't disintegrate nearly as much as most people and she pulled herself together really fast. Maybe it's the midwife trip. Which isn't to say she didn't have a rough time. Everyone does. She shook like a leaf and Martha had to hold her up when she saw her first dragon — lying just outside the cave mouth of Dragon Central. She — Valerie (Vhaaaaaahhhhreeeeee) — recognized Sadie as a new human and raised her head only a very little and very slowly, and didn't move the rest of herself at all, at first, till Sadie stopped clinging to Martha and at least half stood on her own feet again. And then Valerie unwound that long neck, which is one of the things dragons do, you're even used to how big they are, and then it's like that day Bud came to fetch me when his wings seemed to unfurl hundreds of miles: when they stretch their necks out toward you the neck goes on and on and on like the yellow brick road and however many times you've seen it you're briefly not sure if there's maybe a wicked witch involved this time after all.

Valerie brought her head about ten feet from us and Sadie gallantly held her ground. I went up to human-arm's length of her — it's no wonder I'm always surprised how big I am with other humans because I'm so used to being bug-sized next to a dragon — and she lifted her lip in what was now standard-dragon invitation to known-human-friend for a chat, and I put my hand there and she said something like, Hmmmm? which meant, more or less, A new one, huh? and I said yes, and Valerie said something like, And there's a purpose to this one, a different purpose, a new purpose? and I rubbed my hand over my face in the basic human "arrrgh" gesture and said something like z1k09&dflj;kgo*&^vx+iueaiiiimmbjdcudpf!!!! because this was so way beyond my powers of communication, and Valerie "laughed" and said, You'd better talk to Bud. (I don't know how the dragons managed to pick up what I call him, but I knew the dragon "word" — the tiny mind-spasm they used to name him to me wasn't his dragon name, and it felt like Bud . . . but that's more stuff I can't explain. They call Gulp Gulp to me too, and Lois I think is Lois, even in Dragonese.)