HARPER
The paper on the exam table crinkles every single time I shift my weight, which means I’ve crinkled it approximately four hundred times in the last ten minutes because I cannot stop moving, and the paper knows it and is judging me.
All three of them are in here. I didn’t plan for all three of them to be in here.
I planned for Asher to come because Asher is calm and quiet and would hold my hand without making it weird, and then Maddox appeared in the corridor outside my suite saying he was coming too, and then Killian was already in the car when we got to it, jacket on, expression indicating he would not be entertaining a discussion about this.
So all three of them are in here. In a room that was already not very large.
Asher’s standing next to me with his arms crossed, close enough that his sleeve is touching my shoulder.
Maddox has found the only other chair in the room and claimed it like territory, leaning back with his ankle crossed over his knee like we’re waiting for a restaurant table instead of a pregnancy confirmation.
Killian is standing at the window with his hands in his pockets looking out at the car park, which is the least interesting view available to any human being on this entire planet, and I’m fairly sure he’s not actually looking at it.
I’ve been doing that thing where I notice every single thing about a room to avoid thinking about the one thing I’m supposed to be thinking about. Ceiling tiles. Fourteen. The poster about hand hygiene has a small crinkle in the lower left corner. The blood pressure cuff on the wall is blue.
I glance at Killian’s back.
Actually, no. I’m done waiting for the doctor to make this conversation happen.
“While we’re here,” I say, to the room, to no one specifically, to all three of them by implication. “I feel like this is a good time to discuss the New York trip.”
Maddox doesn’t look up from his phone. “Harper.”
“And the file on my parents.”
“Sweetheart.”
“And the fact that Killian apparently has some kind of board vote situation happening that nobody told me about.”
Killian turns from the window.
“You want to have this conversation right now?”
“I’m in a hospital gown. My butt is approximately one wrong shift away from being visible to everyone in this room. I am absolutely in the position of power here, which means right now is exactly the right time. So talk, or I’ll kick you all out.”
Asher raises his hand slightly. “What did I do?”
I point at him. “Nothing.”
“Then why—”
“Because it’s only fair that if one baby daddy fucks up, you all fuck up. Collective accountability. That’s just how this works.”
Maddox puts his phone away. “That’s not how accountability works.”
“It is now. I’m pregnant, I make the rules.”
A pause.
“She’s got a point,” Maddox says.
“She does not have a point,” Killian says, at the exact same time, and then they look at each other and something passes between them that I’ve started recognizing as the silent forty-year-friendship shorthand I’m never going to be fully fluent in.
Killian uncrosses his arms. He walks me through it properly, all of it, the vote count, Renard and Beaumont and Delacroix, the timeline, why he needed silence to keep Evelyn from digging in before he had the numbers locked.
He doesn’t apologize for the plan itself, which I wouldn’t have wanted anyway.
He apologizes for the eleven days of making me wonder.
It’s the most words I’ve heard him use in a row that weren’t related to the vineyard, and something about the fact that he’s doing it in an exam room with paper crinkling under me every thirty seconds makes it feel more real than it would’ve in his office.
I let him finish.
“Okay,” I say.
He blinks. “Okay?”
“You should have told me. You know you should have told me.”
Asher makes a sound that might be a suppressed laugh. Maddox doesn’t even try to suppress his.
“You’re not going to yell?” Killian asks.
“I’m conserving energy. There’s a baby in here.”
The door opens and the doctor comes in, tablet in hand, scanning it as she walks.
“Harper Brooks?”
“That’s me.”
“Date of birth, April fourteenth, twenty-four years old?”
“That’s me too.”
She makes a note, then looks up and clocks the three men distributed around the room with the expression of someone doing quiet math.
“And these three gentlemen are...”
“The fathers,” Asher says.
She raises one eyebrow. Just one, which I respect enormously. Nods once, slow, the way people nod when they’ve decided not to ask any follow-up questions.
“Okay then.” She glances back at her tablet. “I was going to mention that we typically allow the patient and one support person in the exam room, but.”
“We’re a special circumstance,” I say. “I apologize if that wasn’t clear in my intake.”
She waves her hand with a small, entirely genuine smile. “Not to worry. Are there any other family members we should plan for going forward?”
“No,” I say. “Three fathers is more than enough for me.”
Asher says, without missing a beat, “What about Sophia? Are you going to want her in the delivery room?”
I grimace. “She doesn’t know yet.”
The doctor glances up. “Who is Sophia?”
“My daughter,” Killian says.
“My best friend,” I say.
“Our goddaughter,” Asher and Maddox say, simultaneously, without looking at each other.
The doctor stares at the four of us for one long, considered moment. Behind her the door opens and a nurse slips in, takes one look at the room, clocks the situation, and hides a full laugh behind a warm, professional smile that she absolutely cannot fully suppress.
“Not a problem at all,” the doctor says, patting my hand once.
“Whomever you’d like in the delivery room is entirely your choice.
I’ll make sure we note to reserve the larger OR for your delivery.
We can discuss method as we get closer, whether that’s a scheduled caesarean, natural birth, or another approach entirely. That decision is completely yours.”
I look at all three of them.
“See?” I say. “I told you. I’m the boss now.”
All three of them laugh, soft, at the same time, which is frankly the most agreeable they’ve been since we walked in here.
She explains what comes next, which is where the mood in the room shifts in a direction nobody was fully prepared for.
“For a pregnancy this early,” she says, snapping on a glove, “we’ll be doing a transvaginal ultrasound.”
“Wait,” Maddox says. “Vaginal? I thought they did it through the stomach. The gel and the wand and all that.”
“That’s later in the pregnancy,” Killian says, in the tone of a man who has done this once before and would like everyone in the room to know it.
“So they have to go—” Maddox points vaguely.
“Yes.”
“Internally.”
“Yes.”
Maddox looks at the doctor. “Will you be her doctor from now through when she delivers?”
The doctor, who is still in the room and heard all of this in real time, looks up from her glove.
“Yes,” she says.
“Okay.” He sits back. “Good. Okay.”
I look at him. “Maddox, she’s a medical professional.”
“I know that.”
“Even if I had a male doctor—”
“That’s not happening, Harper. Ever.”
The nurse, to her even greater credit, has turned to face the supply cabinet and her shoulders are shaking.
Asher pats my hand and I let Maddox’s little freak-out go.
The ultrasound takes less time than I expected and produces an image that looks, honestly, like television static to anyone without medical training.
Then the doctor points.
“There,” she says, tapping the screen with the tip of her pen. “That’s your baby.”
I stare at it.
It’s small. Impossibly, almost insultingly small, a little round shape barely distinguishable from the gray around it, a smudge on a screen, and I have no idea why my eyes are filling the way they are except that somehow, in the space of one second, that tiny dot has rearranged something in my chest that I don’t think is ever going back to where it was.
I didn’t expect this. I expected relief, maybe, or confirmation, the satisfaction of having the thing I already knew confirmed in clinical terms. I didn’t expect to feel it like this, all at once, like my whole body has just understood something my brain has been trying to catch up to for weeks.
I’ve never loved a dot on a screen so much in my entire life.
“Can we—” Maddox’s voice comes out rougher than usual, and he clears his throat once. “Can we get pictures? To take home?”
The doctor smiles, warm and practiced in a way that says she’s seen this moment a thousand times and it still gets her every single time. “Absolutely. I’ll take several so you all have plenty to choose from.”
The nurse is already moving to help, and I hear the soft click of the machine capturing the image, once, twice, three times, and somewhere in the middle of it a tear slides down my cheek that I didn’t give permission to leave.
Killian’s beside me before I even register him moving, one hand cupping the side of my face, his thumb catching the tear with a gentleness that doesn’t match his size or his suits or any version of him I knew before this summer.
“Harper.” His voice is low, just for me. “Hey. How are you feeling?”
I open my mouth to say fine, which is what I always say, and instead what comes out is a laugh that’s mostly air and mostly wet and doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever produced before.
“I didn’t know,” I manage. “I didn’t know I could love something that small. I didn’t know it was going to feel like this.”
His expression does something I’ve only seen it do a handful of times, something open and unguarded and completely uninterested in hiding itself, and he leans down and presses his mouth to mine, soft and slow and unhurried, the kind of kiss that has nothing to prove.
Asher’s lips find the back of my hand where he’s been holding it, warm and quiet.
Maddox presses a kiss to the top of my head, lingers there for a second, doesn’t say anything, which from him says everything.
I look back at the screen.
The little shape sits there completely unbothered, round and still and tiny, with no idea it’s already got four people completely undone by it.
I’m crying and grinning at the same time, which probably looks insane, and I genuinely cannot stop either one, my cheeks burning from the smile that won’t quit, my eyes too full to clear no matter how many times I blink.
“Hi,” I whisper, to the screen, to the little dot, to whoever’s in there getting comfortable. “Hi, baby.”