Excerpt from Tilt by Emma Pattee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

JUST WAIT, starts off every piece of advice that anyone gives a pregnant woman.

You're tired now? Just wait.

You're anxious and scared now? Just wait.

You think you've felt love? Just wait.

As if there is another choice.

Now you're banging on me like a drum, and my hunger is little knives stabbing into me. I'm starving, and not just for any food, but a $1.50 IKEA cinnamon roll. Once I get your crib, I'm going to reward myself with one. Or maybe four. That thick fake crusty icing. I won't even wait until I get home, just sit in the car and eat all four. Lick the icing off my fingers.

My feet are starting to pulse, which is always a bad sign. In the past month, my feet have inflated. Slowly, night after night, they have grown rounder and rounder. I adjusted the straps of my Birkenstocks wider, and then wider, and now they are as wide as they'll go, and my feet still ooze through the straps like pudding.

Why did I come here, Bean? My mother told me when I was a baby, she used to put me to sleep in a plastic laundry basket next to her in bed. She'd put her fingers through the little windows and I'd catch hold of them.

I'm suddenly so tired. And lonely. I want to be home.

Home where I'm going to open the fridge door and everything inside will bore me, where I'll close the fridge door and see a list written on the back of a ripped envelope that says BEFORE BABY, and nothing will be crossed off. Where I'll go lie on the couch and be unable to sleep and end up watching reality TV for hours, where I'll pass by the guest room which is supposed to be your nursery but is really just an empty room with a car seat still in a box.

I pull out my phone to text your father, but I can't think of what to say.

We haven't spoken since last night, since the fight.

What was the fight about?

Everything, Bean. And nothing.

Because all fights are about nothing in the grand scheme of things but then also in the grand scheme of things when taken all together, they tell a larger story. Like each fight is a star in the sky and now that I've been with your father for a decade or so I can look up at the constellation of all our arguments and see a shape there, clear as day. What shape, Bean? I don't know. I don't want to know. I just look away.

Excerpted from Tilt by Emma Pattee. Copyright © 2025 by Emma Pattee. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.