Mag-log inCaden made a sound that was technically a word and entirely incomprehensible, some collision of "what" and a strangled cheer that came out as neither.Odette got there faster, both hands flying to her mouth, eyes already welling."Say it again," Caden said. "I don't think I heard it right.""We're getting married," Reid repeated, patient, a small smile pulling at the corner of his mouth."You heard it right," Wren said. "I promise.""Good," Sloane said, from his spot by the window, and it landed with more weight than the word usually carried from him. He set his glass down like he wanted both hands free for a moment, though he didn't do anything with them.Lyra smiled, the specific smile she saved for moments that confirmed something she already believed about the world, and reached over to squeeze Sloane's arm without looking away from Reid and Wren.Isla, without meaning to, burst into tears, which surprised her more than anyone else in the room."Sorry," she said, laughing through
They spent Saturday doing nothing practical about the room at all.Isla sat cross-legged on the bare floor with a mug of tea, looking at the walls the way she looked at every empty space — like it hadn't decided yet what it wanted to be, and her job was just to wait it out.Zachary sat down beside her, back against the wall, without being asked."You're doing your thing," he said."What thing.""The thing where you go quiet and stare at a wall like it's about to tell you something.""It might.""It's drywall, Isla.""Everything's drywall until it isn't."He almost laughed, and let the quiet settle instead, and for a while they just sat there, the morning light shifting slowly across the floor between them."Dublin," he said eventually. "If the timeline flexes the way you said, what does the next year actually look like.""Busy. Good busy." She turned her mug slowly in her hands. "Some months there, some months here. You flying back and forth more than either of us wants, probably.""I
Isla came down the stairs and found Zachary already sitting in the car, engine off, waiting.She hadn't asked him to come. She got in and didn't mention it, filing it under the growing list of things she no longer needed to ask him for."You've been down here a while," she said, buckling her seatbelt."Ten minutes.""You could've come up.""You looked like you were having a moment with the mirror. I didn't want to interrupt a moment.""I was deciding if this shirt made me look pregnant or just like I'd had a big breakfast.""For the record, neither.""That's not helpful, Zachary.""You look like yourself. I told you that already, back at the wedding. I'm not going to have a different answer just because there's more going on underneath now."She let that sit for a second, then reached over and squeezed his knee once before he pulled out of the space.The waiting room, when they got there, was nothing like the ones he was used to — brighter, louder, a scattering of couples in every sta
Caden made it a full twenty-four hours, which he later described as a personal record.Odette needed forty seconds."You're doing the face," she said, the moment he walked through her door."What face.""The face you did when you found out about my birthday party three years early. The face that means you know something and physically cannot hold it.""I don't have a face.""Caden."He held out for exactly four more seconds."Isla's pregnant," he said, in a rush, and then looked immediately relieved, like something physically painful had been released from his body.Odette called Isla within the hour."Did he tell you," Isla asked, picking up, "or did you just know?""Both simultaneously," Odette said. "His face told me, and then when I asked, he confirmed it.""He lasted a full day.""That's genuinely impressive, for him."From there it moved fast, the way things did in that particular group of people — three hours, start to finish.Zachary called Reid himself, which was how Reid und
They agreed without much discussion at all."Not yet," Isla said, still sitting on the counter, the test wrapped carefully in a paper towel beside her."Not yet," Zachary agreed."The second Caden finds out, it stops being ours.""It becomes an event.""A very loud event."He almost smiled at that, still standing close, one hand resting on her knee. "We can have a day. Just one. Before it's everyone's.""One day," she said.The day passed with a strange, shifted weight to it, the way days do when you're carrying something that changes everything and haven't told anyone yet.He brought her coffee mid-morning, setting it down beside her sketches without a word, and she looked at it for a second longer than usual, thinking, absurdly, that this was the first coffee of an entirely different life, though the coffee itself looked exactly the same.She sat with her Dublin drawings spread across the table and found herself looking at them differently now, recalculating timelines in her head —
The delivery arrived while he was in the shower.Isla heard the buzzer, went to the door in her socks, and signed for the small brown bag without letting the delivery driver see her face too closely.She carried it to the second bathroom, the one off the kitchen, grateful in a way she hadn't expected to be that they had two.She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet with the box in her hands, not opening it right away.She wasn't afraid, exactly. It was more that she was suspended, caught in that particular held-breath space between not knowing and knowing, where anything was still possible and nothing had been decided yet.She opened the box. Took the test out. Read the instructions twice even though they were simple.Then she took it, set it carefully on the edge of the sink, and pulled up the timer on her phone.Three minutes.She sat down on the bathroom floor, back against the tub, and let her mind wander wherever it wanted to go, which turned out to be everywhere except the o
Isla was on her knees on the fourteenth floor, unpacking the last crate of framed prints, when her phone rang.She almost didn't answer. Her hands were full and her hair was in her face and she had seventeen things left to do before the afternoon walkthrough with the building's events coordinator.
The call came at 8:47 a.m. Zachary was already moving through the corridor of Cole Global's fortieth floor when he answered, phone pressed to his ear, free hand in his pocket. "Mr. Cole." His doctor's voice was carefully measured. "The final results are in. I'm afraid the progression is faster t
Reid's dinner parties were never actually dinner parties.Isla figured that out within the first ten minutes.The food was real — properly cooked, properly served, the kind of meal that required actual effort — but the people were too carefully chosen for it to be casual. Everyone in the room knew
She arrived at 8:58 am.Zachary's PA, a composed woman named Diana who had worked for him for seven years and prided herself on being unshockable, did a very subtle double take when Isla Simmons stepped out of the elevator — portfolio under one arm, slightly windswept from the New York morning, loo







