SEVEN MONTHS OF SILENCE (JULIAN'S POV)

The door had barely stopped rattling in its frame and I still hadn't managed to say another word.

Maya. It was actually her. Seven months of telling myself the masquerade had been some kind of fever dream, some perfect, impossible night I'd built up in my head because reality had never given me anything to compare it to, and here she was, standing behind a bakery counter with flour on her hands and my child under her ribs.

I'd spent the drive up the mountain on a call with legal, cutting off a junior associate mid-sentence because he hadn't read the terms closely enough, and I hadn't thought twice about it.

That was simply how I ran things. I did not, as a rule, arrive anywhere soft.

"Maya. Is that.....?" I couldn't finish it. I didn't need to. Her face told me everything the rest of the sentence would have.

"You need to leave," she said instead, voice tight, already moving toward the door like she could physically push the last thirty seconds back outside with the storm. "The roads aren't safe. You should go."

"The roads aren't safe," I repeated, "which is exactly why I'm not going anywhere until you answer me."

"There's nothing to answer."

"There's a very obvious thing to answer."

"Julian....."

"Say my name like that all you want. It doesn't change the question."

I stayed where I was, snow still melting off my shoulders onto her floor. "Seven months ago I met a woman at a masquerade. She wouldn't tell me her name."

Her eyes flicked toward the back room half a second before I heard anything back there myself, some small sound I couldn't place, and I filed the reaction away without understanding it.

She had good instincts. I assumed that was all it was.

"This isn't the time."

"I've had seven months of it not being the time." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. "I'm making it the time. Was it you?"

She didn't answer right away, and the silence told me more than a denial would have.

"Was it you?" I said again.

"Yes." The word came out small, almost angry, like she resented having to give it to me. "It was me. Are you happy?"

"Happy isn't the word I'd use."

"Then why does it matter?"

"Because you disappeared."

I took a step closer, and she didn't step back, which I noticed even through the noise in my own head.

"No name, no note, nothing. I spent months telling myself I'd imagined how it felt. And now I'm standing in your shop looking at you, seven months along, and I would like you to tell me I'm wrong about what that means."

Her jaw tightened. She didn't answer, and the silence stretched long enough to become its own kind of answer, though not one either of us said out loud.

The floor tilted slightly under me anyway. I'd known, somewhere in the part of my brain that still worked, since the second I saw her.

Her silence didn't confirm it. It didn't have to. It closed a door on the version of tonight where I could still convince myself I'd made a mistake.

"Then why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "Why run?"

"Because it's complicated."

"Try me."

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me anyway."

"Julian."

The bell above the door jingled, cutting her off, and a young woman burst in from the back, cheeks red from the cold, arms full of firewood.

"Maya, the Petersons' driveway is completely buried. I had to leave the car and walk the last stretch."

She stopped dead when she saw me, eyes flicking between the two of us, clearly trying to work out what she'd walked into.

"Am I interrupting something?"

"No," Maya said, at the exact moment I said, "Yes."

"Who's this?" the woman asked, looking me over with open suspicion.

"That's Chloe," Maya said, ignoring the question entirely. "She helps me run the shop."

Then, to Chloe, with a pointed look toward the back room:

"Can you go check on the generator?"

"We don't have a generator."

"Chloe."

"Right. Generator. Got it."

She vanished through a doorway behind the counter, and the moment it swung shut, Maya turned back to me, arms crossed, jaw set.

"You can't be here," she said.

"I'm already here."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant."

I looked around the shop for the first time since I'd stumbled in, really looked, at the shelves of hand painted toys crowded next to cooling trays of cookies, string lights looped along the ceiling in a pattern that had clearly been strung by someone with more sentiment than symmetry.

Nothing about it matched the woman from the masquerade, the one in silk and a mask who'd danced like she owned the room. And yet somehow it suited her more than that ballroom ever had.

"You have a whole life here."

"I have the only life I have," she said. "And you being in it is not part of the plan."

"There's a plan."

"There was."

The lights flickered once, twice, and died.

For a second the only sound in the shop was the wind outside and both of us breathing in the sudden dark.

I'd spent the last decade in rooms with backup generators, redundant systems, power that never failed because failure wasn't an option my father's company allowed for. It struck me, absurdly, that I had no idea what to do in an actual blackout.

"Power's out," Maya said, unnecessarily.

"I noticed."

"There's a storm warning covering half the county. This could be a while."

A drawer opened, closed. A match struck, and a small circle of candlelight bloomed between us, throwing her face into soft gold and shadow.

She looked exhausted in a way I hadn't clocked in the panic of the last few minutes, dark circles under her eyes, one hand pressed unconsciously against her lower back.

"Sit down," I said. "You look like you're about to fall over."

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

"I don't need you telling me what I am."

"Then stop proving me right." I pulled a stool out from behind the counter anyway and set it down in front of her, and after a long moment she sat, more out of exhaustion, I thought, than agreement.

I shrugged out of my coat and draped it over her shoulders before she could argue.

She opened her mouth, clearly ready to, and then seemed to think better of it, pulling it tighter instead.

"You shouldn't be cold," I said. "Not in your condition."

"My condition."

Something flickered across her face, almost a laugh, almost something sadder.

"That's one word for it."

"What's another one?"

She didn't answer. She just looked at me across the candlelight, one hand resting against the curve of her stomach like she wasn't fully aware she was doing it, and something quiet settled in my chest, something that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with the fact that whatever she wanted to call it, whatever she was still refusing to say out loud, I already knew.

"That's my baby," I said. "I know it is."

She didn't answer. She didn't have to.

The candle flickered between us, and outside the wind screamed against the windows like it had no intention of letting either of us leave any time soon.