Page 66 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

Narrow aisles. At the end was a man in glasses shelving travel guides. A woman reading a thriller’s last page. But no Mary.

At the florist, the woman behind the counter shook her head before I finished asking. “I saw her when I put some flowers outside. She went that way,” she said, pointing toward the river. “Looked upset, poor thing.”

I thanked her and moved faster. My coat pulled tight across my shoulders as I broke into a run. People turned. Someone swore when I cut around them. I didn’t care. Rain slid into my collar and down the back of my neck. My pulse beat hard in my throat.

If she’d come to us frightened and we’d missed her, I wouldn’t forgive myself.

The river path opened ahead. Gray water. Wet stone. Bare trees along the embankment. Office workers under umbrellas. Tourists taking photographs of the London Eye.

Then I saw her.

She walked along the Thames with no umbrella, her coat darkening under the rain, one hand pressed to her stomach and the other wrapped around a folded cream card.

The sight of her stopped me so completely that a man behind me bumped my shoulder and muttered something unkind. I watched her, because this was Mary. Not memory, not scent, not almost. She was here. In London and walking away from our office so quickly as if the ground beneath her feet might disappear if she stopped.

Then I rushed fast enough that my shoes struck water from the pavement.

“Mary.”

She stopped. Her shoulders rose with one breath, then lowered. But for a moment, she didn’t turn around.

When she finally faced me, every rehearsed line I’d prepared in the last two months left my head.

The rain caught in her hair, darkening the waves around her pale face. Beautiful, yes. That had never been the problem. Dark hair, blue eyes, mouth pressed tight. She looked thinner than she should have, tired in the delicate skin beneath her eyes, and frightened in a way that made her sass feel folded away somewhere she couldn’t reach.

I stopped a few feet from her, not close enough to crowd but close enough to catch her scent.

“How did you find us?” I asked.

Not hello, not are you all right, not the hundred things I should have said if my chest weren’t closing around the fact that she was here.

We had looked for her in Boston. Two weeks of it, quietly and thoroughly, and every thread had gone cold. When we finally found her dorm, the room was already cleared, the number we found in Damien’s phone was no longer in service. The registrar would confirm only that Ms. McCarthy’s studies had moved online. She had left the country before we’d properly begun.

Mary swallowed. “Didn’t you want to be found?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“You never came back to Boston. So I assumed you chose Damien, and I understood.”

“We came back,” I said. “To tell him, but we saw you and then didn’t, and—“

“Oh.” Her gaze moved over my suit, my watch. “You’re rich.”

“I have a good job.”

“And a lobby that made me feel underdressed in my own skin. I thought you worked there not owned the building.”

“Mary.”

She looked away and her fingers tightened around the cream card. The card from Boston. Hudson and Lincoln Holdings, heavy stock, embossed lettering, private investment and property development listed in three cities. I’d given it to her as a lifeline. She’d kept it for two months.

I took it carefully. The corner was bent. One edge had softened, as if she’d held it too often. “You kept it.”

“I considered burning it once. Very symbolic. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any matches.”

“Lucky for the card.”

“It has led an eventful life.”