Mag-log inI lean into him. "We really did start with a contract.""We did.""And now we have this.""Yeah. Now we have this."Maya cries out upstairs. Not scared. Just a dream. We both listen, waiting to see if she'll settle. She does. Back to sleep in seconds."I love you," Aiden says."I love you too.""I m
Taylor's POVThree years after the contract. Two years after the wedding. Eighteen months after Maya was born.It's a Tuesday night in October. Nothing special. Just a regular evening in the life we built.I'm in the kitchen making dinner. Maya is on the floor with her blocks, building something tha
The woman closed her notebook. "That's beautiful.""It's not beautiful. It's work. Really hard work. We still fight. We still build walls sometimes. We still have moments where we want to run because running is easier than staying. But we don't run. We stay. And we figure it out. That's the whole jo
Taylor's POVWe were at a foundation event two years after Maya was born when someone asked the question."How did you two make it work?" The woman was young, sharp-eyed, holding a notebook. A journalist, probably. Or a grad student writing a thesis. "You started with so much against you. The family
"Did it?" Kiera asked."No. We fell in love anyway. Threw out the contract after three months. Got married. Had her." He gestured to the baby monitor. "And now we're here.""That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard," Kiera said."It's not romantic. It's messy. We spent a year knocking down wal
Taylor's POVMaya's first birthday fell on a Saturday in October, eighteen months after the contract, fourteen months after the wedding, one year after she'd arrived and changed everything.We threw a party. Small. Just the people who'd earned their way to the table.My father arrived early, carryin
Taylor's POVThe hospital called on a Thursday.Not Dylan's doctors—they'd learned I wasn't that person anymore. This was a different voice, a social liaison with the careful, scripted empathy of someone paid to deliver bad news. "Ms. Jones, I'm contacting you as a former significant other on our ma
It lasted forty-eight hours.On Thursday, Liam came home from school with a split lip and bruised knuckles. He wouldn't talk at first. Then it spilled out—the older kid in the lunch line, loud enough for everyone to hear: "Your sister's that gold-digger. The one on TV who thinks she's too good for m
Taylor's POVThe league's letter wasn't a knife in the dark. It was a subpoena served in broad daylight. And I decided to treat it like one."We're not sending them a P*F," I told Aiden and Carter in our first war room meeting. The spreadsheets and legal pads were out, but my mind was already somewh
Carter's money hit the account like a thunderclap—a seven-figure wire transfer that was supposed to feel like freedom but mostly felt like a ticking clock.Suddenly, we weren't a scrappy startup operating out of a refurbished warehouse. We were an organization. With payroll, HR headaches, compliance







