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“I will leave this house. I will walk out that door and into traffic.”

Mom drops her hands and laughs—full, real, the kind of laugh that shakes her shoulders and fills the kitchen—and I sit there with my face in my hands while the two people I love most in the world bond over my sex life.

When the laughter dies down—mine included, because I can’t help it, because this is absurd and perfect and nothing like what I imagined—I straighten up and take Aiden’s hand under the table.

“Mom, there’s something else.”

She sobers, reads my face. “What is it?”

“Ben can’t know.”

The kitchen goes quiet again. Different quiet this time.

“Ben is a cop, Mom. If he finds out what Aiden is—I don’t know what he’d do. I don’t think he’d turn him in, but I don’t know, and I can’t risk it. Not yet.”

She nods slowly. “Your brother loves you.”

“I know. That’s why I can’t tell him. Because Ben’s love looks like protection, and protection means doing what he thinks is right, and what he thinks is right might not be what’s right for me.”

“You’re asking me to keep a secret from your brother.”

“I’m asking you to trust me.”

She looks at Aiden. Looks at me. Looks at our hands, laced together on top of the table.

“Also,” I say, and this is the part that tightens my chest, “the people who made Aiden—the company, the program—it was all shut down. The units were supposed to be destroyed. He wasn’t. And if anyone finds out he’s still active, they could come looking for him.”

“Looking for him to do what?”

“Take him back. Dismantle him. I don’t know exactly. But he’s not supposed to exist, Mom. In the eyes of the law, he’s—”

“He’s sitting in my kitchen drinking tea he can’t drink and loving my daughter better than any man ever has,” Mom says firmly. “And if anyone tries to take him, they’ll have to get through me first.”

Her jaw is set. Her eyes are bright. She looks exactly the way she looked when I was twelve and a boy on the playground pushed me, and she marched into the principal’s office the next morning and didn’t leave until the kid was suspended and his parents were notified and the playground equipment was inspected for safety hazards.

Karen Hart, defender of her children. Biological or otherwise.

“What about babies?” she asks. Gentler now. The question she’s been holding.

I look at Aiden. He looks at me. We’ve talked about this—late at night, in bed, in the quiet. Not a long conversation. Not a heavy one. Just honest.

“We’ll adopt,” I say, and I take his hand and lace our fingers together on top of the table where she can see. “When we’re ready. There are kids out there who need someone, and we’ll be that someone.”

Mom’s eyes fill. She presses her napkin to her face and holds it there for a moment, and when she lowers it, she’s smiling—the real one, the Karen Hart smile that could light a stadium.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “Oh, you two.”

She stands up, comes around the table, and hugs us both. One arm around me, one arm around Aiden, pulling us together like she’s holding her whole world in her arms. Aiden goes still for a second—the surprised kind, the kind that means his body hasn’t caught up to what’s happening—and then his arm goes around her, tentative, careful, and Karen Hart squeezes tighter.

“You’re family,” she says into his shoulder. “I don’t care what you’re made of. You’re family.”

Aiden doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. But I can see his face over my mother’s shoulder, and his expression is the one I’ve only seen twice before: at the wedding, during the vows, and in my apartment, in the dark, when I told him I loved him.

It’s the expression of a man who just found out he belongs somewhere.

On the drive home, he’s quiet.

“You okay?” I ask.