Page 58 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

Mac ran back and pressed a toy car into my palm.

“Hold this.”

“Am I parking it?”

“No. It’s hiding.”

“From who?”

He looked over his shoulder at Mila, who was now wearing the wooden knight’s helmet on one finger. “Everyone.”

“Relatable,” I said, and tucked the car under the edge of my cardigan. The nice, soft, long one I stole from Maeve.

“Do you have a house?” Mac asked.

“Not at the moment.”

“Where do you sleep?” Three years old, a wooden knight in one fist, and straight to the only question that mattered.

“Upstairs in your home,” I said. “For now.”

“Good.” He appeared to consider the matter closed, and went back to the burial.

My own child would do this one day. Put sticky hands on my face, and decide that grass was a castle and adults were furniture. He or she would look at me as though I knew how the world worked, which was unfair, because I’d recently discovered I didn’t know how my own life worked. Obviously, I’d have no secret security nor acres of land.

I pressed my hand low over my stomach.

No bump yet, not properly. Nothing a stranger would notice. There was a softness that I noticed because it belonged to me, because I was the one brushing my teeth with one hand braced on the sink every morning, because I was the one crying over the stupidest things.

I was going to be a single mother. I could do it. Maeve had been prepared to do it.

She’d built a life around Mac before he was born, frightened, alone, and hunted by a man who should have been given a prison sentence. Her pack had found her before she gave birth, but the fierce part had already been there. Maeve had loved her son hard enough that the whole world had eventually been forced to rearrange itself around them.

I could probably do it too.

That was the part nobody put on inspirational mugs. With enough money, nausea medication, online classes, and the occasional private breakdown in a shower, I could become someone’s mother without ruining either of us.

Mac collapsed dramatically beside me, one arm across his forehead.

“I died.”

“Very inconsiderate.”

“You have to be sad.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

I patted his knee. “What a loss. History will limp onward.”

He opened one eye. “That’s not sad. You’re weird.”

“It’s sad in Ireland.”

Mila toddled over and dropped a fistful of grass onto his chest.

“Fowers,” she announced.