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“Mom had lost three and was getting older,” Widow interrupts. “After the last one, she went to put flowers on the graves and . . . there it was. I was just a bonus baby.”

“But you can’t have children,” I say. “So you knew—”

“I knew one day, he’d pop back up, so to speak,” Widow says.

I lean my head against the back of the office chair, stretching my neck. In my lap, the puppy rolls over, all four legs in the air. Four legs that I watched bend, heard break. In her cage, the cat bats at Widow’s fingers with paws that should be stripped to bone, twitching a tail that shouldn’t exist.

“What happens?” I ask. “When he . . . ?”

“Is born?” Widow supplies. “I don’t know. I haven’t done this before. I imagine it’s like anything else that comes out of an egg.”

“So, when your brother . . . hatches”—I shake my head, the words odd on my tongue—“what then? You’ve just got a baby and nobody asks questions about that?” Having accepted the impossible, my mind has jumped to the practical. “He’ll need a social security number, a birth certificate. You’re not going to be able to just trot out a baby and—”

“Kiddo, I have an extensive network of people that find ways around the law, and the government. Wildlife people get shit done. Maybe not always the legal way, but done. Also, I don’t think babies trot.”

“This one might,” I tell her.

The puppy sneezes, jolted to life by the movement. He flips onto all fours, spots Widow, jumps from my lap and runs to her, standing on his hind legs, begging to be picked up. She scoops him up, cuddles him against her jaw.

“What now?” I ask her, eyes going to the incubator, where something is waiting to be born. Someone. Typhus Zedeker.

“We wait,” Widow says, following my gaze.

“How long?”

Widow studies the egg, watches as it stretches. “It will be soon.”

Thirty-Nine

Micah

She’s not answering, she’s not answering, she’s not answering.

This is the only thing my brain knows, the only fact that the world contains. Things were good, everything was fine, there was hope in my life, and now—nothing. My last text to Ava said, Sorry if I’m being weird, and I’ve spent sixteen hours waiting for her to tell me that I’m not.

Maybe I should call her.

“Stop,” I say, before I dial.

Three unanswered texts shouldn’t induce panic, but of course it does because I’m me. I don’t want to compound that with an ignored phone call. Also, I should double-check my Rock Bottom DMs, because I might have sent Ava a string of messages last night when I couldn’t rouse her through text. But I can’t even say for sure if I did or not, because I started drinking about two hours after my last unanswered text, and didn’t really stop until one of Mom’s Ambiens made me. That was around four in the morning, and my last conscious thought as I looked at the clock was that everything would be okay when I woke up, because she’ll have responded by then, and the longer I can be unconscious, the more time she has to do that. I stretched my comatose state into two in the afternoon, only getting up because—once it gets a grip—potty training is deeply ingrained.

When I pick up my phone, I have nine texts. My heart jumps, blood pulsing, hope rising, then plummeting when I see that three are from Hailey, six from Ethan. The first four from him are pretty straightforward.

Fuck you.

Really.

Fuck you.

I mean it.

The three from Hailey are not surprises, either.

Fuck you.

Fuck off.

Please call Ethan back.