Page 95 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

I catch my own reflection over the top of my knees, mascara smudged from laughing, hair a wreck, mouthing along to a chorus I’m apparently still singing under my breath, and something about the absurdity of the whole tableau gets to me.

“Who the fuck are you talking to, Harper?” I say, louder than I mean to, directly at her. “No one’s here. There’s no studio audience. Nobody’s watching this performance.”

My reflection doesn’t argue.

“Wait, why am I talking to myself,” I say, to no one, again, immediately undermining the entire point I just made. “Urrgh.”

I drop my head back against the cabinet and close my eyes, breathing for a second, music still going, hand still resting against my stomach, two lines still sitting on the sink like they’re waiting for me to do something about them.

My phone buzzes on the floor beside me, cutting through the song.

I don’t reach for it right away. I sit there a little longer and let myself have one more breath before I have to be a person again.

Eventually I pick it up.

Sophia: Breakfast in 20? Need grease and aspirin ASAP

I stare at it.

Twenty minutes to become a person who can stand in a tasting room and have an opinion about shelf height while carrying around the single biggest piece of information of my life and saying nothing to the one person who’d lose her mind in the best and worst possible ways if she knew.

I push myself up off the floor, bracing one hand against the counter for support, and my legs hold this time, mostly. I set the test face up on the sink, not ready to throw it away or stop looking at it, and look at my reflection properly for the first time since the timer went off.

“Okay,” I tell her, out loud, because apparently that’s still the only thing that keeps me upright. “Okay. One thing at a time. Breakfast first.”

My reflection looks terrified and thrilled in roughly equal measure.

Honestly, fair.

I splash cold water on my face, blot it carefully so I don’t ruin what’s left of my mascara, and pull my hair back into something that looks intentional instead of like a woman who just found out she’s pregnant and somehow ended up happy about it.

I glance at the test one more time on my way out.

FUUUUUCK…..

I close the bathroom door behind me, soft, almost reverent, like I’m leaving a small sleeping thing in there instead of a piece of plastic, and walk toward the suite door with my hand pressed flat against my stomach the whole way, already talking quietly to whoever’s in there, already promising her or him or it that whatever happens with the rest of this mess, I’ve got us.

34

MADDOX

I’ve been avoiding this conversation for days, which is some kind of personal record, because the version of me that existed before Harper doesn’t sit on anything. I see a problem, I fix it, I don’t wait around weighing the optics of fixing it. That’s always been the whole appeal of being me. But somewhere in the last few months I apparently developed the ability to hold something uncomfortable without immediately detonating it, which I used to think was a character flaw in other people and now understand is just exhausting.

Eleven days of watching Harper smile half a second too late at things that used to land immediately. Eleven days of her saying she’s fine in that bright, settled voice she uses when she’s decided fine is the answer regardless of whether it’s true, and me not pushing, because pushing means asking the question underneath it, which is why isn’t Killian here, and I genuinely don’t trust myself with whatever the answer to that turns out to be.

This morning she said it again. Standing in the kitchen in Asher’s shirt with her coffee, hair still damp, telling us she’s fine, just tired, the boutique’s been a lot. Asher let it go the way Asher lets everything go, a hand at the small of her back and a plate of eggs he didn’t ask if she wanted.

I didn’t let it go.

I watched her leave for the tasting room and felt something in my chest finally tip past the edge it’s been balanced on for almost two weeks.

I needed her gone for a few hours. Not gone-gone, just somewhere I wouldn’t have to perform calm while I went and found Killian and made him explain himself, because Harper reads me better than anyone alive at this point and the second she clocked the look on my face she’d want to know why, and I didn’t have an answer for her yet that wouldn’t make things worse before they got better.

So I did the one thing I’m apparently capable of now that I never used to be, which is plan instead of just act. I caught her on her way out of my suite this morning and asked, casual as I could manage, whether she’d thought about spending the afternoon with Sophia. Told her Asher had inventory at both restaurants today, a full count, hours of it, and that Lorenzo and Raphael were already heading to the tasting room anyway, and didn’t she still owe Sophia a fitting for some piece she’d been promising to model.

Fucking Raphael. Of all the men on this property I could’ve engineered into spending an afternoon with my girl, it had to be the one I still haven’t fully forgiven for existing in her orbit during those first few weeks, even though I know exactly how unfair that is, even though he’s good for her in every way that’s never once threatened the four of us. Doesn’t matter. Some old, stupid, possessive part of me still flinches at his name, and I hate that about myself almost as much as I hate that I used him as the bait anyway because I knew it would work.

It worked.