Lahat ng Kabanata ng Destined to Love the Twin Brothers: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

The email arrived on an ordinary Tuesday, buried among routine project updates, and Wren almost missed it entirely before the subject line caught her attention properly.Lead Architect Position - Whitmore Regional DevelopmentShe read it twice at her desk, her coffee going cold beside her, the specific disbelief of seeing something she'd quietly hoped for without ever fully admitting it to herself. The position was real, substantial, a lead role on a major regional development project, the kind of opportunity that came along once in a career if it came along at all. It also came with a catch significant enough to make her stomach drop before she'd even finished reading the full description.The project was based two hours away. The role would require relocating, or at minimum, spending the majority of her week in a city that wasn't home, for at least the eighteen months the project was projected to take.She sat with the email for a long time before mentioning it to anyone, turning th

The small apartment near the project site was efficient and impersonal in a way that made Wren's chest ache the first night she stayed there alone, the bare walls and unfamiliar furniture a stark contrast to the carefully built warmth of the house on Miller Street.She video called both of them that first evening, propping her phone against a stack of unpacked boxes, and found some comfort in seeing their faces even through a screen, Declan sprawled on the living room couch back home, Rory in the kitchen finishing dishes with the phone balanced awkwardly on the counter."How's the new place," Declan asked, though his tone suggested he already suspected the honest answer."Lonely," Wren admitted. "I know that's not what I'm supposed to say on the first night. I'm supposed to be excited about the project, and I am. But this apartment doesn't feel like anything yet, and I miss the house already.""That's allowed," Rory said, setting down the dish towel to give the call his full attention

They spent the following weeks, in the small gaps between Wren's project deadlines and the workshop's steady demands, quietly researching what a formal commitment between three people might actually look like, legally and practically, in a world that had never quite built room for it."There's no marriage license for three people," Rory said one evening, sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop open, the blue light of the screen catching the frustration in his expression. "Not here. Not in most places. I've been reading for an hour and the legal options are basically nonexistent.""I figured as much," Declan said, leaning over his shoulder to look at the screen. "Doesn't mean there's nothing, though. People have found ways to build legal protection into relationships that don't fit the standard shape. Wills, powers of attorney, co ownership agreements. It's not the same as a marriage license, but it's not nothing either."Wren looked between them, something warm settling in her ch

Declan had been planning something for nearly a month, careful and quiet in a way that felt entirely unlike his usual easy transparency, and Rory had noticed, though he'd said nothing, trusting that his brother would explain in his own time.It started with a series of hushed phone calls Declan took outside the workshop, and a visit to Eleanor's house that he mentioned only in passing, and a folder he kept locked in his truck's glove compartment that he closed quickly whenever anyone walked by. By the time Wren's project finally reached its final month, eighteen months after she'd first accepted the position, Rory understood that whatever his brother was building, it was coming to a head soon.Declan finally pulled him aside on a quiet Tuesday evening, the workshop empty except for the two of them, Wren still two hours away finishing the last details of her project."I need your help with something," he said, pulling the folder from his glove compartment and setting it on the workbenc

Eleanor took charge of the planning with the same brisk efficiency she brought to running a business, and within a week of the engagement, the kitchen table at Miller Street had become the unofficial headquarters for what she insisted on calling, simply, "the celebration," refusing any word that implied a traditional shape that didn't actually fit."We're not calling it a wedding," she announced, the first planning session, spreading out notebooks and fabric swatches with the enthusiasm of someone who had clearly been waiting two years for exactly this project. "Not because there's anything wrong with the word, but because I think the three of you deserve something built specifically for what you are, not borrowed wholesale from a tradition that assumes two people.""What do we call it, then?" Wren asked, genuinely curious."I don't know yet. Maybe we don't decide until it happens, and then we know what to call it because we've lived it." Eleanor looked up from her notebook, something