Page 61 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“Exactly. I’ve become honest through technicality.”

Maeve leaned back on her hands and looked back at the house. Mac and Mila hadn’t made it inside, because Mac had discovered a stick and was explaining how to use it as a weapon to Mila.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” she said.

My throat tightened.

That was the problem with Maeve. She could argue like a solicitor with a grudge, but then she’d say something plain and kind and ruin my ability to be evasive.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I’m in a fortified Surrey house surrounded by people who could make your mafia ex disappear. I’ve gathered the context clues.”

“He’s not dead yet, and that’s not what I mean.”

“I know. But they did dig the grave, so the opportunity is still there.”

“When I was where you are,” Maeve said, ignoring me. “I had a coffee shop, a dog with a shoe problem, and a plan made almost entirely of spite.”

“It worked.”

“It nearly didn’t. I wasn’t brave, Mary. I was cornered, and people call that brave afterward because it makes a tidier story.”

I pulled up a blade of grass and split it down the middle.

“You’re not cornered,” she said. “That’s the difference between us. You have a choice, and you’re carrying it about like a life sentence.”

We sat with that for a while.

The garden moved around us. Leaves shifted in the breeze. Mila squealed when Mac waved the stick too close to her shoe. A guard walked along the far wall, discreet as a shadow and twice as observant.

“They should know,” Maeve said.

“I know that too.”

“Then why haven’t you told them?”

Because they might be kind.

Because they might be horrified.

And also because I’d know, for certain, that I was never enough for them.

“Because I don’t know how to find them,” I said.

Maeve’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a lie.”

“I lost the card.”

She knew a partial truth when she heard one. She had practically invented the genre.

But how do I tell them I’m pregnant when their son rang them looking for me?

“Mary.”

“I said I’ll try to find them.”