Page 110 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

I glance at Killian’s back.

Actually, no. I’m done waiting for the doctor to make this conversation happen.

“While we’re here,” I say, to the room, to no one specifically, to all three of them by implication. “I feel like this is a good time to discuss the New York trip.”

Maddox doesn’t look up from his phone. “Harper.”

“And the file on my parents.”

“Sweetheart.”

“And the fact that Killian apparently has some kind of board vote situation happening that nobody told me about.”

Killian turns from the window.

“You want to have this conversation right now?”

“I’m in a hospital gown. My butt is approximately one wrong shift away from being visible to everyone in this room. I am absolutely in the position of power here, which means right now is exactly the right time. So talk, or I’ll kick you all out.”

Asher raises his hand slightly. “What did I do?”

I point at him. “Nothing.”

“Then why⁠—”

“Because it’s only fair that if one baby daddy fucks up, you all fuck up. Collective accountability. That’s just how this works.”

Maddox puts his phone away. “That’s not how accountability works.”

“It is now. I’m pregnant, I make the rules.”

A pause.

“She’s got a point,” Maddox says.

“She does not have a point,” Killian says, at the exact same time, and then they look at each other and something passes between them that I’ve started recognizing as the silent forty-year-friendship shorthand I’m never going to be fully fluent in.

Killian uncrosses his arms. He walks me through it properly, all of it, the vote count, Renard and Beaumont and Delacroix, the timeline, why he needed silence to keep Evelyn from digging in before he had the numbers locked. He doesn’t apologize for the plan itself, which I wouldn’t have wanted anyway. He apologizes for the eleven days of making me wonder. It’s the most words I’ve heard him use in a row that weren’t related to the vineyard, and something about the fact that he’s doing it in an exam room with paper crinkling under me every thirty seconds makes it feel more real than it would’ve in his office.

I let him finish.

“Okay,” I say.

He blinks. “Okay?”

“You should have told me. You know you should have told me.”

Asher makes a sound that might be a suppressed laugh. Maddox doesn’t even try to suppress his.

“You’re not going to yell?” Killian asks.

“I’m conserving energy. There’s a baby in here.”

The door opens and the doctor comes in, tablet in hand, scanning it as she walks.

“Harper Brooks?”

“That’s me.”