Page 77 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

Andrew seals it. Liam carries it to the counter by the door so we won't forget it in the morning.

I close my laptop.

The four of us sit there in the quiet.

The kitchen light catches on the edge of the table. Someone's half-empty water glass leaves a ring. Andrew's running shoes sit by the door, still dusty from the Strip.

“So we wait,” Liam says.

I look at each of them in turn.

“We wait,” I agree.

The envelope sits on the counter like a small white bomb.

I keep looking at it like it might move.

Like it could split open and spill answers across the counter before I'm ready.

Seven days.

I push my chair back. The scrape sounds too loud.

Andrew reaches over and catches my hand before I can stand. His thumb brushes my knuckles, slow and gentle.

The touch is light like he’s still not sure I’m going to let him keep me.

Heat spreads anyway before I can stop it.

“Hey,” he says.

I look up.

Ethan stands too. He moves behind me and rests a hand on my shoulder, thumb stroking once.

Liam steps forward. His fingers find my other wrist, light but sure.

For a moment none of us move.

The fan keeps humming overhead.

I don’t know if I’m ready for what comes after.

But we’re doing this together.

That has to matter.I think about Portland. The apartment I've been paying rent on for two months without sleeping in it. The ficus I forgot to ask my neighbor to water. Three client deadlines I used to track obsessively, now sitting in my inbox unanswered.

I think about what I was before I got on the plane. Careful. Small. A life I'd built so specifically that no one could walk into it and surprise me anymore. Jules said exactly that on the phone and she wasn't wrong.

And now I'm at a kitchen table with three men who know what I look like when I'm scared, waiting on an envelope that's going to change all of our lives.

The terrifying thing isn't the result.

It's that I want this. All of it. Even the parts that don't have a clean answer yet.

Because if I let myself have this and lose them anyway—the way Andrew left, the way my parents didn't get to stay—I don't know how to survive losing all of them at once.

My thumb hovers over Jules’s name in my contacts. She still doesn’t know the full extent of it. I can’t bring myself to type it out. That I’m about to tie myself to Andrew, and his two best friends for the rest of my life.