The Six-Fifteen Problem

POV: Imogen

The Sydney sunrise had no respect for blackout curtains.

By six-fifteen, pale gold light was already pushing through the gap in the twins' bedroom window and landing across Declan's face with the cheerful persistence of a force that had never once been told no. He scrunched his nose. Pulled his blanket higher. Kept snoring.

Imogen stood in the doorway with her tea going cold and her patience doing the same.

"Hayley. Declan." Pleasant. Measured. The voice of a woman who had not already been awake for forty minutes was running through every possible way today could go wrong. "Up. Now."

Nothing.

She walked in, pulled the blanket off Declan in one clean motion, and watched him sit bolt upright with his amber eyes wide and his blonde hair pointing in four directions.

"I'm awake," he announced.

"Wonderful news." She moved to Hayley's bed.

Her daughter was already sitting up, dark hair tangled, those grey eyes fixed on Imogen with a quiet focus that made the morning feel briefly held still. Hayley had her father's eyes. Exact shade, exact stillness. Imogen had made her peace with that around the twins' second birthday, mostly because she didn't have a choice.

"You didn't sleep again," Hayley said.

"I slept fine."

Hayley said nothing. Just watched her cross to the wardrobe.

Downstairs, the cottage kitchen held the kind of warmth Imogen had built into it deliberately. The twins' drawings were layered across the fridge in overlapping chaos. A trailing plant crowded the windowsill. The kettle had clicked on at six. The cottage was small, rented, and showed its age in the scuffed floorboards and the back garden Declan had systematically ruined over summer, but she had made it feel solid.

She was at the stove when it happened. Not a dramatic sound. More like the noise of cardboard meeting a force it was never designed to survive.

She turned.

Declan sat at the kitchen table with the flattened remains of his juice box in one hand and orange juice covering the table, his uniform, and, impressively, the wall behind him. He looked at the wall. He looked at her. He wore the expression of a boy ambushed by his own hands.

"I was only picking it up," he said.

"I know." She crossed to him, took the box, binned it, and started wiping the table. No lecture. No point. She had been explaining away his strength since he was eighteen months old. The bent spoon at two. The garden gate at three. The juice boxes were practically a weekly event now, and each one reminded her that time was running out.

Through the kitchen window, a dark SUV was moving slowly along the residential street outside. Unhurried. The kind of pace that belonged to a figure looking rather than going somewhere. She tracked it until it turned the corner and disappeared.

Probably nothing.

She kept her face neutral and went back to wiping the table.

"You're doing the worried thing," Hayley said from across the table.

"I'm doing the cleaning thing."

"Both."

Imogen looked at her daughter and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say to that. Hayley felt rooms the way other people felt temperature. At four, she had told Imogen the woman at the supermarket checkout was sad about something she hadn't told anyone. She had been right. She was always right, which was wonderful and exhausting in equal measure.

"Finish your porridge," Imogen said.

A knock at the front door arrived at exactly the right moment.

Cooper Ashford let himself in the way he always did, with the ease of a man who had been given a key and understood what that meant. He was tall and lean, sandy-haired, with hazel eyes that found Imogen across the kitchen immediately. Silvercrest's Beta. Thirty years old. Dependable enough that she had stopped thinking of reliability as one of his qualities. It was simply who he was.

He had driven Imogen and the twins to school every morning for two years without once making it feel like she owed him.

He took in the juice-wall situation without a word and poured himself coffee from the pot she always made enough of, settling against the counter beside her. His arm almost brushed hers when he reached for the sugar. Almost.

She shifted slightly left. He noticed. He said nothing.

"Coop!" Declan's face lit up like someone had flipped a switch. "Did you bring the ball?"

"Boot of the car," Cooper said.

"Yes." Declan pumped his fist, nearly taking out his porridge bowl in the process.

Cooper caught it without looking, set it back, and kept drinking his coffee. Imogen watched the exchange and felt the familiar complicated weight of it settle somewhere in her chest. The twins adored him. Of course they did. He showed up. He remembered the ball. He sat through homework without checking his phone and taught Declan to kick without flinching every time the boy's foot sent the ball through the fence rather than over it.

He was good to them. And one day, when Lachlan Pierce finally found them, that was going to make everything considerably harder.

She pushed the thought away before it could take hold.

"Tyson pushed Chloe off the swing yesterday," Declan announced, mouth still half full.

"Don't talk with food in your mouth," Imogen said.

He swallowed. "He needs to learn respect."

The words came out flat and certain and oddly weighted for a five-year-old. Cooper's eyes moved to hers across the kitchen. Quick. Quiet. He had heard it too. That low, settled authority in her son's voice, the certainty that had no business being there yet and kept showing up anyway.

Her wolf shifted uneasily against her ribs.