Page 144 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“All right,” Mary said. “Sleep well in there. Or whatever it is you do. Float responsibly. And no fighting. Save that until you’re thirty.”

Hudson reached for my wrist, fingers tight as he pulled me away before she could see us listening.

In the hall, he let out a breath. “She called herself Mama,” he said.

“Aye.”

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

I thought of Damien when he was small and furious, refusing to call us anything because his mother had told him we were friends. I thought of his mother on the balcony of our first London flat, smoking though she had promised to quit, looking out at the city as if it were a room she had already decided to leave.

She hadn’t been cruel. She’d been lonely, restless, and tired of being needed by men who weren’t her scent matches and a boy who had already been hurt. And we were young. Too young to understand that we would never be enough. But we cared for her. She cared for us, in her way. But it hadn’t been enough.

When she left, years later, she wrote that she had mistaken being settled for being happy.

Damien had been seventeen and had pretended he didn’t care until I found him in the kitchen at two in the morning, eating cereal from the box with dry eyes and a face like stone.

“Damien texted again,” Hudson said.

My teeth came together. “When?”

“During the call. He lands on Thursday.”

“Does he know anything?”

“No.”

“We need to tell him before he arrives here.”

Hudson nodded. “He’s going to hate us.”

That was what people never understood about wounds. They wanted a villain because it made the scar easier to explain. But we’d already taken the blame for his mother leaving. This was just another scar.

Mary’s door opened then. She stepped into the hallway and stopped when she saw us. Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you both standing there looking emotionally suspicious?”

“We’re not,” Hudson said.

“You absolutely are.”

“How are the babies?” I asked.

Her cheeks went pink. “Spying is illegal.”

“Listening in one’s own corridor is a gray area.”

“Morally gray.”

“Legally defensible,” Hudson said.

Mary pointed at him. “You’re exactly why no one trusts rich men.”

He came closer and caught her hand. “You were talking to them.”

“Briefly.”

“Mary.”

“Fine, extensively. They deserve guidance. They have made several strange decisions already.”