Page 19 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

On the desk, beside the ice bucket and the pointless harbor print, lay the card he’d pressed into my hand. A lifeline, not an obligation, he’d said, as though a business card could be either.

I crossed the room with the towel clutched to my chest and picked it up.

Hudson and Lincoln Holdings. Private investment. Property development. London, Boston, Edinburgh.

“Dangerous,” I said.

“Hudson and Lincoln.” I tested the names. “Room four one six.”

I put the card down. Then I picked it up again.

“This is absurd.”

The cramp answered by dragging a low, hot sound out of my throat, and I pressed my thighs together and shut my eyes.

I could wait until morning. Or I could ring the clinic again and cry at the nurse who had congratulated me on my inventory.

No, I should ring my sister and admit my brave, independent life had lasted until the first serious biological inconvenience, at which point I’d become a damp, furious heap in a hotel towel.

I felt very far from home.

I found a coin at the bottom of my bag, wedged between a pencil and an emergency tampon. A quarter, American and smug.

“Fine,” I told it. “You can be a democracy.”

I balanced it on my thumb. “Heads, you go to the clinic and tails, you sleep with two alphas.”

I hesitated. Then I picked up my phone and rang my sister.

“Mary, what’s the matter?” She answered without it ringing.

“I’m going to flip a coin.”

“Why?”

“I’m going into heat, Maeve, and there are two alphas down the hallway who are ready to take me through it.”

“You are not doing this with strangers. Book the heat clinic now.”

“I have an appointment for tomorrow morning. Anyway, you did it with strangers. You told me to fly to Prague.”

“I was kidding.”

I rolled the coin over my knuckles. “Tails, I sleep with two alphas, and heads, I go to the clinic. There. Very balanced.”

“Mary McCarthy.”

I flipped it. It turned once and landed tails-up on the carpet by my bare foot.

“It’s tails.”

“It’s probably heads and you just want a reason to walk down that corridor.”

“Democracy has spoken, Maeve. The universe, perhaps.”

“Democracy’s an eejit and so are you. And I don’t want to hear about the universe, because what would be the point?”

“Thanks for your help.”