INICIAR SESIÓNIsla 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
New York took them back the way it always did — loud, indifferent, entirely unbothered by the fact that they'd just come from a week of feeling enormous things on a cliff in Ireland.The apartment was quiet when they got in, bags dropped by the door, and Isla stood in the middle of the living room for a moment just looking around."It feels different," she said."Different how?""Like it knows something permanent happened." She walked over to the windowsill, where the plant he'd bought her from the street market was thriving, two new leaves unfurled since they'd left. "Look at that.""It's a plant, Isla.""It's a sign.""Of what?""I haven't decided yet. But it's definitely a sign."The first week back fell into a rhythm that was loose and slightly chaotic in the specific way of two people whose schedules didn't quite line up. Isla spread large sheets of paper across the kitchen table every morning, sketching preliminary plans for Dublin, and Zachary eased back into Cole Global in car
She sat with the email a moment longer, the window still open, the coast still doing its ordinary grey thing outside, and then she picked up her phone and called Marcus.He answered on the third ring. "Isla. How's married life.""One day in. Ask me again in a year." She sat up straighter against the pillows. "Marcus, I need to talk to you about the Dublin project.""I heard it got bigger.""It got a lot bigger. Public funding, tripled budget, full civic scope."There was a pause on the line, short, considering."This one's yours, not ours," he said, before she had to find a way to say it herself. "You've been yours for a while, Isla. I think you knew that."She let out a breath. "I did know that. I just didn't want to say it out loud.""You don't need Hartwell's name on this. You need your own. Take it. Take it as yourself.""Thank you, Marcus. For saying it so I didn't have to.""You've earned the right to outgrow us," he said. "That's not a bad thing. That's the whole point of the j
Reid told her in the corridor outside the office while Zachary was still standing at the window inside with the file in his hand.He didn't give her details. He just said "He knew before Zachary did. Dorian knew he was sick before the diagnosis," and then he looked at her in the way that said the
Three days of work.Long days that started at seven in the morning and ended when the light outside the Cole Global London office windows had been dark for hours and nobody had noticed because the documents on the table were more consuming than anything happening outside. They ordered food in. The
The flight was seven hours and they moved through it the way people move through long distance travel when they have things on their minds — not together exactly, but not apart either. Zachary worked for four of them. Isla could see the reflection of his laptop screen in the dark window beside hi
Odette didn't announce it. She texted Isla at six in the morning London time, which meant it was one in the morning in New York, which meant she'd been awake thinking about it long enough to make a decision. "I'm coming. Don't argue." Isla read it in the hotel bathroom while Zachary was still s







