Somehow, the space felt even smaller than I remembered. It certainly wasn’t as big as a two-story den, with two of three large guys keeping me warm—and hot—whenever my bear demanded it.
My stomach grumbled, reminding me I hadn’t eaten since yesterday when Hawk served us a nest dinner of perfectly seasoned pork chops, spiced applesauce, and a creamy Parmesan risotto, which was, according to him, “subtly infused with thyme.” As usual, the whole meal had been a masterpiece of simple ingredients transformed into something extraordinary.
Leif had complimented him profusely. And Koda had suspected out loud, “I believe you might be an even better cook than that outsider grizzly Holly’s sister mated.”
A bubble of laughter rose, remembering how Leif had immediately come to the defense of outsider grizzlies—before conceding, “But yeah, you totally lapped him, bro.”
My bear whimpered inside of me, wanting the den, wantingthem. But I cut off the memory, shoving it way down where it belonged.
That fever dream was over, I reminded the both of us. It was time to attend to my real life.
By myself.
Estrus was over.
And so was my so-called maul.
Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I grabbed the laptop I’d left sitting on top of an end table to put in an online grocery order from the nearest Barrington’s.
But guilt and dread twisted in my chest when the screen lit up with pop-ups of all the calls and emails I’d missed while deluding myself into thinking I was the main character in my own Bear Mountain romance.
My stomach twisted at the many missed call alerts from my best friend, Lark. Then it sank further when I saw the subject line of the latest email from my partner hospital, Vancouver Pacific Health Center:Re: Re: Re: URGENT: Midwife License Concerns.
Oh no…In British Columbia, midwife licenses had to be renewed annually between February 1st and March 31st. I’d been waiting to resolve my permanent residency application status before renewing it since I no longer had Corey as my anchor. I knew I was cutting it close, but I didn’t think the hospital would start sending me emails about it before the renewal period was even done.
Crap! Crap! Crap!
The shrill bloop-bloop-bloop of a Facetime call interrupted my bureaucracy spiral. And I answered it when I saw it was Lark, trying to get through.
Lark was my best friend in Vancouver. We’d met in an online support group for Women Dealing with Infertility. We’d become instant friends as soon as we’d discovered we were both BlackAmericans living in Vancouver—though Lark hadn’t moved here on the political whim of her half-Canadian fiancé like I had, but because she and her fraternal twin sister had snagged jobs as teachers at Barrington Prep, one of Canada’s most exclusive boarding schools.
Despite having a busy schedule herself, she’d really been there for me over the years, offering emotional support through not only my last miscarriage but also my divorce from Corey. And I knew she’d been feeling some conflicted emotions around her twin sister falling pregnant with her fiancé so easily, while Lark was still dealing with the emotional fallout of being diagnosed with Primary Ovarian Insufficiency, a condition that would most likely prevent her from carrying a child.
“Hey, you,” I said, accepting the call.
Lark’s familiar face filled the screen, framed by the dorm room she lived in at Barrington Prep to earn extra money for the complicated set of steps she’d need to go through to achieve her baby dreams—most of which weren’t covered by British Columbia’s public health system.
She’d done a great job of keeping a positive attitude through her private pain, but today her usually sunny expression was pinched and wary.
“What’s going on?” I asked, immediately sensing something wrong.
“I just got off the phone with my sister,” she began, skipping pleasantries.
My heart sank for her, but I kept my face neutral as I prepared to validate her conflicted feelings around her twin’s pregnancy.
But then Lark said, “She told me Vancouver Health Center called, asking her to pick another midwife because you no longer had privileges there.”
“What?” I immediately pulled up the mail screen on my laptop. “Why?”
Lark winced on the other side of the screen. “Something about an issue with your midwife license?”
My heart plummeted. “No, no, that’s impossible. It’s only February 12th, not the end of March yet. They wouldn’t just yank my?—”
I stopped talking when I opened an end-of-day email that started with,“Since you haven’t answered any of our calls or emails over the past several days, we’re afraid we’ll need to revoke…”
“No! No! No!” I whispered as I read the email, informing me that yanking my privileges was exactly what the VHC had done for all my scheduled births—until I presented them with proof that my midwife license was in good standing and had been renewed for the year.
The words blurred as panic set in, and the apartment closed in around me.
