KILLIAN
I'm on the phone with my legal team when the door opens without a knock.
Sophia has never knocked in her life. I don't know why I still register its absence as a surprise.
“Dad.”
I hold up one finger without turning around.
Thomas, who handles my estate planning and has the patience of a man who's been billing me by the hour for fifteen years, keeps talking through the specifics of the inheritance amendment.
I've added language for a second beneficiary, a child not yet born, the biological parentage deliberately left unspecified in the current draft because we're still working out how to structure that cleanly across three potential fathers without the document reading like a contract dispute waiting to happen.
The health coverage is cleaner, direct, attached to the estate's existing policy, effective immediately.
The employment contract extension is already drafted.
“Dad.”
I hold up the finger again.
“Killian.”
I turn.
Sophia is standing in front of my desk with her arms crossed and the specific expression she inherited directly from me, the one that says she's been reasonable for a measurable amount of time and has now decided to stop.
“What's wrong?” I ask.
“What's wrong is nobody is telling me what's going on.”
I look at her. She's clearly upset, which is different from her usual theatrical version of upset. Her jaw is tight. Her eyes are doing the thing they do when she's genuinely worried about someone rather than performing it.
“Elaborate, Sophia.”
“Why did Harper need you and Uncles Maddox and Asher to go to the doctor with her?”
Oh. “What did she say when she told you?”
Sophia stares at me. Her eyes go wide. She makes a short, frustrated sound that doesn't belong to any language.
“Tell me what the hell is going on or I swear I will walk into town naked.”
“That wouldn't be the first time.”
“I'll key your Bugatti.”
“Again, not the first.”
“I'll—” She pauses, recalibrating, and then something behind her eyes sharpens in a way that I recognize as the expression of a woman who has located her largest available weapon. “I'll tell Mom you want to get back together with her.”
“That's low, Soph.”
“Tell me.” She pulls out her phone with the specific theatrical deliberateness of someone who has already won and knows it, and turns the screen toward me. Evelyn's contact, pulled up, Sophia's thumb hovering over the call button with the patience of a hostage negotiator.
I look at the phone.
I look at Sophia.
“Sit down,” I say.
She stares at me. Looks at Thomas's paperwork spread across my desk, which I should have thought to close before she got through the door.
Her eyes move to my second monitor, which I also should have thought to lock, and on which the legal documents are still open alongside the scan images my assistant had framed this afternoon.
Her eyes land on the image.
She goes very still for exactly one second.
Then she screams.
Not a scream of alarm. A scream of pure, undiluted, wall-vibrating joy that is going to give Thomas cardiac trouble if he's still on the line.
“HARPER'S PREGNANT!!!!!”
“Sophia—”
She's already around the desk, hands on my monitor, face six inches from the screen, and then she spins back to me with both hands over her mouth and eyes that are already threatening to spill over.
“Dad. Dad. Is that— is that the baby?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“I cannot keep my voice down right now, this is not a keep-your-voice-down situation!”
A knock at the door. My assistant, Camille, who has the timing of a woman who's been with me long enough to know exactly when to appear.
Sophia spins toward the door. “Come in!”
It's not her office. She's done this since she was seven.
Camille comes in carrying three shadowbox frames, each one matted in cream, the ultrasound images sitting centered inside them, clean and quiet and exactly what I asked for when I called from the car on the way back from the clinic.
Sophia makes a sound that doesn't belong to any language.
She crosses the room in three strides and takes the frames from Camille's hands before she's fully through the door, holding one up to the light, then the next, turning them over like she's checking for something, then clutching one to her chest with both arms.
“These are amazing,” she says, voice cracking. “These are the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life.” She throws her arms around Camille, who stumbles one step backward and then steadies and pats her firmly on the back, laughing. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Of course,” Camille says, catching my eye over Sophia's shoulder with an expression of warm, professional amusement.
“Thank you, Camille,” I say.
She excuses herself with the tact she's been deploying on my behalf for eleven years, closing the door behind her.
Sophia turns back to me still holding the frame to her chest, cheeks wet, beaming so hard it's making her face do something it doesn't usually do, something completely open and unguarded and young in the way she only lets herself be when it's just us.
“Am I getting a little nugget sibling?”
I pause. “They'll be a girl or a boy. But yes.”
“Dad.”
“I know.”
“How do you feel about that?”
I look at the frame she's holding, the small shape in the center of it, and think about the call I was on when she walked in, the inheritance language, the health coverage, all the structural, practical ways I've been trying to make sure that child is taken care of before they're even real enough to hold.
“Good,” I say. Which isn't the word. But it's the one that comes out. “How do you feel becoming a big sister?”
“Good,” she repeats, and laughs, wet and delighted. “This is the greatest thing ever for my best friend to officially be part of the family. Dad, this is—” She shakes her head. “Four of my favorite people are having a baby. There aren't enough words.”
She crosses the room and wraps both arms around my neck the way she did when she was small, and I put my arms around her and hold on, and for a moment neither of us says anything.
She pulls back first, and I take the frame from her gently, and I look at it for a moment the way I've been looking at it since Camille brought them in, the way I keep expecting the feeling to level off and it doesn't.
Sophia crosses her arms, watching me with that look she's had since she was seventeen.
“So what were you doing in here that was such a big secret?”
“Hmm? Nothing.”
“Dad.”
I glance at the documents still open on the screen. She follows my eyes.
“Is that legal paperwork?”
I tell her. The contract extension, the health coverage, the inheritance amendment, all of it. She listens the way she's learned to listen, without interrupting, which she definitely didn't inherit from me.
“Have you discussed any of this with Harper?” she asks, when I've finished.
“Not yet. I wanted it drafted first.”
“Dad.”
“She'd argue against it.”
“Of course she would, that's not the point.”
“The point is she and our child will be taken care of regardless of—”
“She's their mom.” Sophia says it flat, patient, the way I say things to board members who are being deliberately obtuse. “You understand that, right? She's the mom.”
“Yes, but—”
“She's the mom, Dad.”
I stop.
Sophia uncrosses her arms and picks up one of the other frames from my desk, holding it the way she held the first one, careful without knowing she's being careful.
“Do you think she'd argue for more for her child versus your share of the inheritance?” I ask. It's a genuine question. I've been running it since Thomas raised the issue of proportional distribution.
Sophia looks at me with an expression I haven't seen since she was sixteen and I forgot to show up to her school showcase because I had a board emergency.
“She wouldn't care if you left her or the baby a potato sack, Dad. What she doesn't like is not being part of the decision. And you know that. You already learned that.”
I did. I know I did. Eleven days of a closed office door and Maddox cornering me in the chai and Harper saying okay, flat and final, in an exam room where the paper wouldn't stop crinkling.
“I'll talk to her,” I say.
“Before or after you have it notarized?”
I put the frame down.
“Before.”
Sophia nods, satisfied, the way she gets when she's made her point and knows it landed. Then she picks up all three frames and holds them against her chest like she's not giving them back, which she clearly isn't.
“These are mine now,” she says.
“There are three of them.”
“One for my suite, one for the boutique, one for when they're old enough to be embarrassed by it.”
I look at her.
She grins back, all teeth, completely unrepentant.
“You're going to be the most chaotic godmother this baby has ever seen,” I say.
“I prefer the term formative influence.” She kisses my cheek on her way to the door. “Go talk to your girlfriend, Dad. Before she finds out you had a lawyer on it before you had the conversation.”
The door closes behind her.
I look at Thomas's notes on my desk. Harper’s not going to be okay with is whether we talk about it before or after, so I pick up my phone and call Thomas back.