2. Maddox
MADDOX
Camille is in Paris right now wearing apparently very little and has excellent taste in photography angles, and I’d like to give her my full attention, but Asher is making it difficult.
Not intentionally. That’s almost the problem.
I set my phone face-down on the leather armrest and watch him from across the FBO lounge.
He’s leaning against the bar in his usual way, arms crossed loosely, that big grounded presence he carries everywhere like it’s nothing.
Vivian is standing close enough that she’s definitely interested and laughing at something he just said, which means whatever it was, it landed.
Asher doesn’t try to be charming. He just is, in the quiet, competent way that women always seem to figure out about thirty seconds after meeting him.
I arranged for Vivian specifically. Called Kyle last week and said make it happen, because the last time Asher had her on a flight she’d laughed at all the right things and touched his arm twice and he’d looked genuinely human for the first time in months.
Then Monica had texted him somewhere over the Rockies on our way back from Napa and Asher had gone still the way he does, read whatever she sent, and spent the rest of the flight being perfectly pleasant and completely absent.
Vivian had noticed. Anyone paying attention would have noticed.
That was Monica’s superpower. She didn’t need to be in the room.
I’ve watched her do it for years. Asher meets someone promising, Monica surfaces, Asher folds.
They’d get back together for a few months, it’d be fine, then it’d be exactly what it always was and they’d end it again and the cycle would reset.
They’d even gotten engaged two years ago, which Killian and I had both agreed was either the best or worst development depending on the day you asked us.
I’d hoped engagement meant Monica had finally decided to be all the way in. I should’ve known better.
She cheated on him. Winston Michaels. Of all the people in their entire social world, of all the directions she could have blown that up, she chose Winston Michaels.
Evelyn Thorne’s brother. As in Killian’s razor-sharp, perpetually dissatisfied ex-wife’s brother, which meant the fallout had tentacles in approximately every direction it possibly could have.
Asher found out. Ended the engagement the same week. Didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t make it dramatic. Just quietly returned the ring and went back to work, which was somehow worse than if he’d put his fist through a wall.
He’s slept with her since. I’m almost certain of it, because Asher has the self-preservation instincts of a man who genuinely believes people deserve second chances and third chances and however many chances they need, which is a beautiful quality in a chef and a devastating quality in a man who keeps falling back toward the same person.
Monica is Asher’s kryptonite and there is nothing Killian or I have been able to say about it that he hasn’t already said to himself.
Vivian laughs again. Asher smiles, real this time, the one that reaches his eyes.
Good. Stay there. Don’t check your phone.
I pick mine back up.
Camille has sent a follow-up.
I’m mid-response when my phone buzzes with something else and I glance down out of habit.
Rachel. The preview shows enough that I know it’s a photo.
Rachel is one of the crew assigned to this flight and she has a very reliable understanding of what I do and don’t want from any given trip, which is why I’ve requested her specific availability three times in the last year.
No complications. No conversations about where this is going.
Just two adults who enjoy each other’s company at thirty thousand feet and land cleanly on the other side.
She’d reached out last week when she saw my name on the manifest. I’d told her I was traveling with family. She’d said that was fine.
I appreciate a woman who understands context.
I pull up the photo, take in the details, and I’m about to type something appropriately appreciative when my phone rings.
Killian’s name on the screen.
I answer laughing because of course I do. “Checking in on us before the party’s even together, Kill?”
“Just making sure you’re not fucking around when you’re supposed to be being a father figure.”
“To be fair,” I say, leaning back in the chair, “we both know I’d pick up the phone even if I was fucking around. That’s called multitasking.”
“Maddox.”
“I need you to bring yourself down to about a forty percent right now. You know Ash and I are helicopter uncles. We’ve had this handled since 2000 and however many years it’s been.”
There’s a pause that means he’s deciding whether to push back on that or let it go. Killian has two modes: controlled and about to be controlled. The pause means we’re safely in the second one.
“Sophia texted?” he asks.
“Not yet. She’ll—” My phone buzzes in my hand. I pull it back and check. “Actually. Right on time. Soph just pulled up.”
“Text me when she’s through the door.”
“I’ll have her send you a photo with today’s newspaper once she walks in. You know, to prove she’s alive and unharmed and in our custody.”
He makes a sound that is not quite a laugh and hangs up.
I set the phone down and look toward the entrance.
This is the part I actually like. Sophia Thorne walking into a room is a specific experience.
She inherited exactly zero of her father’s restraint and every single bit of his presence, and she deploys both without any apparent awareness of the effect.
She’ll walk through a door talking mid-sentence to whoever’s with her and immediately fill whatever space she’s entered like she’s already claimed it on the way in.
She’s been doing it since she was eight years old and decided that Asher’s kitchen was technically her jurisdiction.
I’d had to explain to Killian, very seriously, that the real authority structure in that house had shifted and he needed to adjust his expectations accordingly.
He had not found this funny. Asher and I had found it extremely funny.
Being a godfather was not something I’d agreed to easily.
Killian had actually had to make a case for it.
I’d told him I wasn’t a kids person, that I wasn’t wired for that kind of responsibility, that he should find someone more suited to the permanence of the thing.
He’d looked at me for a long moment and said you’re already there every other weekend and you brought her a stuffed penguin from Buenos Aires last month without anyone asking you to, so I’m not sure what you think you’re opting out of.
He’d had a point.
What I hadn’t expected was how much easier it would be than I’d feared.
Because the thing about being a godfather is that the weight of it isn’t in the legal definition.
It’s in the Tuesday night phone calls when she was sixteen and couldn’t talk to her dad about something.
It’s in driving her to look at colleges even though Killian had offered a car service, because she’d asked me specifically.
It’s in the fact that she’s twenty-five now with her own boutique and her own life and she still texts me when something is wrong before she texts almost anyone else.
Asher is the one in Killian’s will. If anything ever happened to Killian and Evelyn, Asher is the named guardian. Which is the right call. Asher is the stable one. Asher is the one who would actually know what to do with a child in a practical, daily sense.
I am the fun one. Always have been. I made my peace with that assignment a long time ago and I stand by it.
My phone buzzes again. Rachel, a second message, and she’s clearly made herself very comfortable in the back of the jet.
I smile and pick up the phone to respond.
The lounge entrance opens.
I glance up expecting Sophia’s hat situation.
I get Sophia’s hat situation. And someone I’ve never seen before.
They come through the door arm in arm, Sophia mid-sentence about something with the energy of a woman who started the conversation in the parking lot and has no intention of stopping, hat slightly askew, free hand gesturing.
The woman beside her is keeping pace and laughing at whatever Sophia’s saying, head tilted, and the laugh is genuine, the kind that makes the whole shape of her change.
Dark hair. A sundress in some warm color that moves when she does.
One of those faces that looks like it’s on the verge of saying something and deciding whether it’s worth the effort.
She’s looking around the lounge now with quiet, careful attention, cataloguing the space the way people do when they’re competent enough to want to know what they’ve walked into before they commit to anything.
She’s gotten my attention just by walking through a door.
I realize I’m still holding my phone without looking at it. Rachel’s message is still on the screen. I have absolutely no memory of what I was about to type.
Sophia spots me across the lounge and her face does the thing it does, bright and immediate, the specific expression she saves for people she’s actually glad to see. She’s already pulling her companion toward me and talking louder now that she has a target.
I stand up.
But my eyes go back to the woman with the dark hair, who glances over and meets mine for half a second before she looks away, like she caught herself doing something she hadn’t meant to.
Just half a second.
I put my phone in my pocket without responding to Rachel.