Chapter 5

JULIETTE

For one full second, nobody on that driveway moved.

Then everyone moved at once.

Sebastian reached the front door before I did, Adrian right behind me, Constance already screaming Delphine's name from somewhere inside the house. I found them in the front hallway, Delphine on the floor with her back against the wall, one hand pressed to her stomach, her face gray in a way that scared me more than any of the shouting had.

"What happened," Sebastian demanded, dropping to his knees beside her.

"I don't know." Rosa's hands were shaking so badly she nearly dropped the phone. "She just went down. She said something about cramping and then she couldn't get back up."

"Call an ambulance," I said. "Now, Rosa. Not the family doctor. An ambulance."

"I already am, ma'am."

Sebastian looked up at me, something raw and unguarded crossing his face for the first time since the papers were signed. "Thank you," he said quietly, like the words cost him something. I did not answer. This was not the time for either of us to figure out what we still owed each other.

Delphine's eyes found mine through the panic, and for a moment there was nothing performative in her face at all, none of the sharp edges she usually kept polished around me. Just fear.

"It hurts," she said. "Juliette, it hurts so much."

"You're going to be fine," I told her, crouching down on her other side without thinking twice about it. "Help is coming. Just breathe."

"The baby." Her fingers dug into my wrist, surprisingly strong for someone who looked like she could barely stay conscious. "If something happens to this baby, it's the only thing I have left of him."

I did not correct her, did not remind her that this was not the moment. I just held her hand and let her grip it as hard as she needed to.

Constance hovered behind us, uncharacteristically useless, repeating "is she going to lose it, is she going to lose the baby" to no one in particular until Sebastian finally snapped at her to either help or step back. She stepped back.

Adrian stood near the door the entire time, close enough to be present, far enough to stay out of the way, watching me instead of the scene on the floor more often than I think he realized. At one point he crouched down without a word and steadied Delphine's shoulder so she would not slide sideways against the wall, then stepped back again as if he had not wanted anyone to notice him doing it.

"You didn't have to do that," I told him quietly.

"I know," he said. "I did it anyway."

The ambulance took eleven minutes, though it felt closer to an hour. Two paramedics moved Delphine onto a stretcher with practiced efficiency, asking questions about how far along she was, when the pain started, whether she had eaten anything unusual that day. Sebastian climbed into the back of the ambulance without a word to anyone, including me.

That left Constance, who turned to look at me for the first time since she had arrived.

"This is your fault," she said quietly, none of her earlier fire left in it, just something colder underneath. "If that child loses this baby on top of losing her husband, I hope you understand exactly whose name I'll be saying for the rest of my life."

"Constance." Adrian's voice cut through before I could answer. "She didn't push Delphine down a flight of stairs. Stress does not work that way, and you know it."

Constance did not respond to him. She simply got into her own car and followed the ambulance down the driveway, leaving deep tire tracks through the snow Rosa had not yet had a chance to clear.

For a moment, the driveway was almost quiet.

"You don't have to say anything," Adrian said, watching my face. "You look like you're about to apologize for something that isn't yours to apologize for."

"I was thinking about it," I admitted.

"Don't."

Rosa appeared at the door, pale and exhausted, Oliver asleep against her shoulder somehow through all of it. "Ma'am, I should follow them to the hospital. Someone needs to be there for Oliver once they get news, in case Mr. Hartwell needs help."

"Go," I said. "I'll be fine here."

Once Rosa's car disappeared down the road, it was just Adrian and me, standing in a driveway gone strange and silent after all that noise.

"I should go too," he said, though he made no move toward his car. "You've had enough men standing too close to you tonight."

"Maybe I don't mind this one standing close."

The words were out before I had fully decided to say them, and I watched something shift behind his eyes, careful and slow, like he was giving me every chance to take it back. I didn't.

"Juliette." My name in his mouth still did something to me that three years apart had apparently done nothing to fix. "If I stay any longer tonight, I'm not going to be very good at keeping my distance. You should know that before I decide anything."

"I didn't ask you to keep your distance."

He crossed the last of the space between us slowly, giving me every second to change my mind. I did not use any of them. His hand came up to my jaw, cold from the snow, warm everywhere it touched anyway, and for one long moment neither of us said anything at all.

I felt his breath before his mouth ever reached mine, a single unhurried second where the whole cold night seemed to hold still around us. When he finally kissed me, it was slow enough that I could have stopped it a dozen times over, and I did not want to stop it even once. Three years of silence dissolved into something that felt less like starting over and more like finally finishing a sentence neither of us had been allowed to say out loud.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine, both of us breathing like we had run somewhere instead of simply standing still.

"I've wanted to do that since the cemetery," he admitted.

"Then you took your time."

"I was trying to be respectful of your husband's brother's funeral," he said. "I have some standards."

I almost laughed for the first time all day.

My phone rang before either of us moved another inch.

I almost let it go to voicemail. Almost. It felt wrong, somehow, to answer a phone call in the middle of a moment like that one, like I was letting the outside world back in before I was ready for it. But something about the timing made me check the screen instead, some instinct I had learned not to ignore, and the name on it made my stomach drop straight through the porch floor.

It was Harper.

"Juliette, you need to sit down before you hear this," she said, her voice tight in a way I had never once heard from her in three years of friendship. "I just got a call from my contact at the coroner's office. About Griffin."

"What about him?"

"The autopsy results came back today." A pause, long enough that I could hear her steadying herself on the other end of the line. "I wasn't even supposed to see this. My contact flagged it to me because she knows we're friends, and she thought you deserved to hear it from someone before it hits the official report."

"Harper, just say it."

"His parachute didn't fail, Juliette. Someone cut the lines."