NEXT THING I KNOW, Fox nudges me awake. Somehow I’ve fallen asleep on his lap, all curled up, though I have no memory of his returning or my dropping off. I sit up too quickly and he catches me just in time. A nurse stands in front of us—a different one than before, younger and smaller, dark-haired, almond-eyed, so that I imagine some warlike Mongol ancestor pillaging his way across the steppes. She points to me, not unfriendly. “Come, please.”

“Go ahead,” says Fox. “I’m meeting someone for breakfast.”

Breakfast. Christ, the dead drop. I’ve forgotten all about it. Some contact was supposed to make a document drop in some predetermined location—inside a hollow stump or a trash can, maybe, marked by chalk or other means, though Fox won’t tell me exactly where—as soon as Iris went to the hospital. Of course, there’s no way to abort this operation at short notice, and he can’t just leave such an extraordinary package lying around for someone to discover.

But where the devil is he going to keep it? Not the hotel room, examined daily by chambermaids and who knows what else.

I shake my head to clear it. The nurse stares at me.

“What time is it?” I ask Fox.

“Just past six o’clock in the morning.”

“Good Lord! Where’s Digby?”

“That’s an excellent question.” Fox rises to his feet, pulls me up by the hand, and kisses me on the lips, because the nurse is watching us. “Give her my love, darling, will you?”

THEY TAKE ME TO see the baby first. He’s lying in a bassinet in the nursery, and even I—with no experience of babies—can see he’s a bruiser. The three infants nearby look so tiny and delicate, and here’s this frowning, squash-faced, broad-shouldered behemoth, crowned by a tuft of pale hair. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Fox had sired him.

The nurse whips a swaddle around him, lifts him up, and dumps him in my arms before I can object. His eyes fly open, but he doesn’t cry. He just stares up at me and works his mouth. I thought newborns’ eyes are supposed to be blue, but his are no color at all, just opaque.

Already the nurse is motioning me to follow her out of the nursery. I trail along behind her. I’m afraid I’ll drop the baby, so I hold on tight as we turn down a couple of corridors and somehow end up in Iris’s old room, from which they wheeled her last night. She lies in her bed, wan and bloodless, but her eyes fly open when I walk in after the nurse.

“Brought you something,” I tell her.