Page 99 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“Is that a threat, Killian?”

“No. It’s my word.” I hold her gaze and let the next part land slow. “And to make up for having fallen short on my word recently to the woman I love, I intend on keeping this one. Regarding the woman who taught me the difference between what you used to call love and what love actually is.”

Her eyes go wide for half a second before the sneer arrives to cover it, late and unconvincing.

“You think you love her?” A short, ugly laugh. “She’s a doll, Killian. A step up from a blow-up and a step down from a Fleshlight.”

I almost laugh too, though not for the reason she wants. I shake my head, let one brow lift, and find that the anger’s already burned off into something closer to pity, which is somehow worse for her than the cold ever was.

Thirty years ago I’d have argued the point. I’d have defended Harper, defended myself, spent another half hour standing in a corridor trying to win something that was never actually a contest. I don’t have the energy for that tonight, and more than that, I don’t have the interest. Evelyn doesn’t get my energy anymore. She hasn’t earned it in years, and I’m done pretending otherwise out of habit or guilt or whatever’s kept me circling back to these conversations for three decades.

She’s still waiting for me to take the bait, chin tipped up, that particular brittle confidence she wears whenever she’s said something cruel enough to draw blood. It doesn’t draw any tonight. Whatever she’s trying to provoke in me left the building eleven days ago, somewhere between Midsummer and this corridor, and I find I don’t miss it.

“Goodnight, Evelyn.”

I step back and walk away, and I don’t look behind me to see what she does with her face once there’s no one left to perform it for. I already know I’m going to keep my word about her, the board seat, the vote, all of it, the same way I’ve kept my word about almost everything else in this life that’s actually mattered.

The corridor’s quiet behind me. No footsteps following, no second attempt at my name. Whatever she’s doing back there, sitting with it or already composing the version of tonight she’ll tell herself later, it’s hers to manage now. I’ve spent thirty years managing it for her, and I find, walking away from it for what feels like the first time in longer than I can name, that I’m not particularly interested in picking that habit back up.

I’m late.

I take the elevator up, willing it to move faster than it does, and somewhere between the second and third floor I catch myself in the polished steel of the doors, jacket still bunched in one fist, tie loosened, looking like a man who’s spent the last eleven days losing an argument with himself and finally lost it for good tonight in a corridor with his ex-wife. It’s not a flattering reflection. It’s an honest one, and honestly is apparently the only currency I have left to spend with anyone tonight, starting with the people waiting for me on the other side of these doors.

I can hear them before the doors even open onto my floor, Maddox’s voice doing something halfway between a story and a complaint, Asher’s low laugh under it, and underneath both of those, hers. That particular sound she makes when she’s trying not to find something funny and losing.

I haven’t heard that sound directed at anything in my own suite in eleven days. I’ve heard it in passing, across a terrace, through a closed door I didn’t have the right to open, but never here, never close enough to feel like it belonged to me too. Standing here listening to it now, I understand exactly how much I’ve cost myself by staying away as long as I did.

I stand outside my own door for one second longer than I need to, just listening to it, just letting it land.

Then I go in.

36

HARPER

Ineed to get ahold of myself.

I keep catching myself pacing with nerves, halfway across the living room with no memory of standing up, and making myself stop, and then five minutes later I’m doing it again. I showered the second I got here, mostly because I needed somewhere to stand still that wasn’t this room, and by the time I came out in a cloud of steam Asher and Maddox had already arrived with enough food to feed the entire tasting room staff.

I haven’t touched any of it.

I don’t know if it’s the baby or the nerves. Possibly both, working together like they’ve formed some kind of committee against my appetite. Asher poured me a glass of wine and thankfully, no one questioned my preference for water, instead. while it’s been sitting on its coaster on the coffee table for twenty minutes, untouched, while he and Maddox eat at the table without me because I told them to go ahead, I wasn’t hungry, I was fine.

I’m not fine. I’m sitting in the armchair that faces straight into the foyer, the one with a clean sightline to the elevator doors, one leg drawn up with my foot on the cushion and my elbow propped on my knee, the other leg folded flat underneath me, and I’m biting my own cuticles like I’m nineteen again and failing a chemistry final.

I haven’t done this since college. I used to do it whenever the stress got bad enough that I couldn’t talk myself down from it, the same way I used to chew the inside of my lip raw, except I don’t have access to any of my usual vices right now. No wine. No long run to burn it off, not with everything still so new and fragile inside me that I’m half convinced overexertion alone could undo it. Just my own teeth working at the edge of my thumbnail and a head full of noise I can’t seem to organize into anything productive.

I used to be better at this. Or at least I used to be better at hiding it, which I suppose isn’t the same thing at all, but it felt close enough back when the only person I had to manage was myself. Now there are three of them to account for, three sets of reactions I can’t predict and can’t control, and somewhere in there a fourth person who doesn’t even have a heartbeat I can hear yet but who’s already rearranging every plan I thought I had for my own life.

My sweater, which is really one of Asher’s, swallows me whole, the sleeves long enough to bury my hands in if I let them, the hem hitting somewhere mid-thigh so the whole thing reads less like a sweater and more like a dress I borrowed from a man twice my size. It still smells faintly of rosemary and butter even after I washed it, which I’ve decided not to mention to him, because some small part of me likes carrying that around without explanation.

Do they even want this. Killian already has Sophia, a fully grown daughter who’s my best friend, which is its own special kind of insane to sit with for too long, and as far as I know neither Asher nor Maddox has ever had kids at all. What if I tell them and the room just goes quiet in the wrong way. What if it turns into some kind of primal who’s-the-real-father posturing, three grown men sizing each other up over a baby that isn’t even fully formed yet. What if it’s the thing that finally breaks whatever this is, whatever the four of us have somehow built out of a summer I never planned for, and any version of a future I didn’t know I wanted until I had it disappears because my body made an executive decision none of us were ready for.

And then there’s the other version, the one I let myself have for exactly four seconds before I shove it back down because it feels too dangerous to hold onto for longer than that. The version where none of them flinch. Where this just becomes one more thing the four of us absorb the way we’ve absorbed everything else this summer, the way Asher absorbed my parents showing up without warning, the way Maddox absorbed an entire investigation he ran quietly behind the scenes before any of us knew to ask, the way Killian apparently absorbed an entire board fight I’m only now finding out about. Maybe this is just one more thing. Maybe it doesn’t have to be the ending I keep building it into in my head.

I’m spiraling. I know I’m spiraling. If I said any of this out loud to a stranger they’d have me committed by morning, but it’s just me in here, just my own head running laps, so I let it run.

I glance at the wine again. Untouched, the surface of it catching the lamplight, and some small, stubborn part of me actually misses the version of stress relief that involved a glass of something dry and a hot bath instead of whatever this is, sitting cross-legged in a borrowed sweater chewing my own fingers raw.