33. Harper #2
I already ran the other math too, the one about who the father might be, lying awake at two in the morning more nights than I’d like to admit. Asher, complicated but survivable. Maddox, a crisis but a forgivable one. Killian, a biblical event that ends with Sophia looking at me like a stranger.
I had it all worked out. That math assumed all three of them were still where I’d left them, Killian’s hand at my back, all of it still humming the way it was those first two weeks after the festival.
It didn’t account for the last nine days. It didn’t account for Midsummer.
Before Midsummer this was easy in a way I still don’t have language for.
The four of us tangled together in Killian’s suite the morning after the festival, nobody performing anything, just warmth and Asher making coffee like he’d done it a hundred times.
Two weeks of feeling more wanted than I’ve ever felt by three men who never made me choose between them.
Then my parents showed up at the boutique launch wearing borrowed confidence and worse intentions, and Killian told them to schedule something properly instead of telling them to leave, and something behind his eyes closed in a way I haven’t been able to get back open since.
He hasn’t really looked at me since. He’s polite. Professional. Asks Mallory for updates instead of me even when I’m standing right there.
“You couldn’t just talk to me,” I say out loud, to the empty bathroom, to a man who’s somewhere on this property and absolutely can’t hear me. “You had to go full brooding billionaire about it and make me guess.”
The bathroom doesn’t respond. Neither does Killian, obviously, which I’m aware of, thank you.
I haven’t slept in the shared condo in nine days. Asher’s suite, mostly, sometimes Maddox’s, trading off like they’ve worked out a rotation neither’s explained. It’s good, genuinely good. But the place where all four of us used to end up together has just stopped happening.
I haven’t asked Killian what’s wrong, and I’m not going to.
I made that decision a month ago, after the maze, when I realized how much space all three of them had taken up in me at once.
I don’t chase. I don’t perform for attention.
I don’t compete with another woman for a man who isn’t sure he wants to be fought for, and I learned that lesson the hard way.
If he’s pulling away, that’s information. What I can’t do is reorganize my whole self around a man’s silence the way my mother did for twenty years with men who never explained themselves.
Which means the version where the baby’s Killian’s doesn’t get to be a clean biblical event anymore. It gets to be that, plus nine days of silence I can’t explain, plus a man who can’t look at me finding out he might be a father while he’s still deciding if he wants to be in the same room as me.
I don’t know what he does with this. I don’t know if he leans in or leans further away, and the not-knowing sits in my chest like something with edges, right alongside the grin that hasn’t fully gone away.
I catch my own reflection over the top of my knees, mascara smudged from laughing, hair a wreck, mouthing along to a chorus I’m apparently still singing under my breath, and something about the absurdity of the whole tableau gets to me.
“Who the fuck are you talking to, Harper?” I say, louder than I mean to, directly at her. “No one’s here. There’s no studio audience. Nobody’s watching this performance.”
My reflection doesn’t argue.
“Wait, why am I talking to myself,” I say, to no one, again, immediately undermining the entire point I just made. “Urrgh.”
I drop my head back against the cabinet and close my eyes, breathing for a second, music still going, hand still resting against my stomach, two lines still sitting on the sink like they’re waiting for me to do something about them.
My phone buzzes on the floor beside me, cutting through the song.
I don’t reach for it right away. I sit there a little longer and let myself have one more breath before I have to be a person again.
Eventually I pick it up.
Sophia: Breakfast in 20? Need grease and aspirin ASAP
I stare at it.
Twenty minutes to become a person who can stand in a tasting room and have an opinion about shelf height while carrying around the single biggest piece of information of my life and saying nothing to the one person who’d lose her mind in the best and worst possible ways if she knew.
I push myself up off the floor, bracing one hand against the counter for support, and my legs hold this time, mostly. I set the test face up on the sink, not ready to throw it away or stop looking at it, and look at my reflection properly for the first time since the timer went off.
“Okay,” I tell her, out loud, because apparently that’s still the only thing that keeps me upright. “Okay. One thing at a time. Breakfast first.”
My reflection looks terrified and thrilled in roughly equal measure.
Honestly, fair.
I splash cold water on my face, blot it carefully so I don’t ruin what’s left of my mascara, and pull my hair back into something that looks intentional instead of like a woman who just found out she’s pregnant and somehow ended up happy about it.
I glance at the test one more time on my way out.
FUUUUUCK…..
I close the bathroom door behind me, soft, almost reverent, like I’m leaving a small sleeping thing in there instead of a piece of plastic, and walk toward the suite door with my hand pressed flat against my stomach the whole way, already talking quietly to whoever’s in there, already promising her or him or it that whatever happens with the rest of this mess, I’ve got us.