Harper
Ihear Sophia before I’m through the boutique door, which is how I usually find her when something isn’t going the way she wants it to.
“Enzo, I need it two inches to the left, not a centimeter, not an inch and a half, two full inches.”
“This is two inches.”
“That is not two inches. I’m talking real measurements not male meteorologist inches.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“Six inches of snow when the actual measurement is one? It’s aspirational, not actual.”
“Sophia, I have a measuring tape right here—”
“Then use it!”
I slip past both of them with the takeout bag from Asher’s restaurant, giving Enzo a sympathetic look that he returns with his eyes, because his hands are occupied holding what appears to be a velvet display fixture that Sophia is eyeing with the focused displeasure of a woman who is personally offended by its placement.
She turns when she hears me and her expression does a full reset, sharp to warm, in about half a second.
“Harps.”
“Harps,” I agree, holding up the bag. “Asher’s. I called in an order.”
She abandons the display situation without a backward glance, which Enzo seems to find both a relief and slightly insulting, and follows me through to her office in the stockroom, which she’s made into something between a workspace and a very chic nest, fabric swatches on one wall, her P&L pinned beside a calendar she actually uses, a tiny lamp that makes everything look like it’s lit by candlelight.
We eat for a few minutes without talking, which is something Sophia and I have always been good at, the comfortable silence version of being in the same room, and I’m grateful for it because I’ve been rehearsing this conversation in my head for two months and none of the versions I practiced start the way I need them to.
I’ve run it as a serious conversation, as a funny one, as a casual thing I slide in between bites of a sandwich.
None of them have sounded like me. All of them have ended with Sophia’s face doing something I couldn’t predict and me not knowing what to do with whatever came next.
The sandwich is good. The lamp is warm. Sophia’s eating with the focused efficiency she brings to everything she genuinely enjoys, which means she’s comfortable, which means this is as good a moment as I’m going to get.
“So,” I say finally, setting down my fork. “You know how I’ve been seeing Killian, Maddox, and Asher?”
Sophia puts her sandwich down, presses both hands flat on the desk, and looks at me with the expression of someone exercising restraint so physically aggressive it’s almost visible.
“Oh, you mean how you’ve been fucking them and you’re pregnant now?”
I immediately bury my face in my hands.
She starts laughing, full and bright and completely uncontrolled, the laugh she only does when something has genuinely got her, and I hear her chair push back and then her hands are pulling mine away from my face and she’s looking at me with tears of amusement running down her face.
“How,” she says, “are you this shy? After the summer of all summers? Courtesy of my family tree?”
“Stop taking it so well,” I tell her, which makes her laugh harder.
“I think you’re the one who took it well, bestie. And then some.”
“But it’s your dad,” I say, because that’s the part that’s been sitting in my chest for months, the part I couldn’t figure out how to say, and apparently the way I say it is just like that, flat and direct and slightly tragic.
Sophia’s smile softens but it doesn’t go away. She squeezes my hands and looks at me with the directness she saves for things that actually matter to her.
“Yeah,” she says. “And he’s a single grown ass man who doesn’t need my permission to fall head over heels for my most favorite person in the world.
” She holds my gaze and doesn’t let me look away from it.
“He makes you happy. That’s what matters to me.
That you’re happy and that my dad is finally getting out of his own way and not burying himself in work and wine groupies. ”
“Wine groupies,” I repeat.
“Don’t ask, it was a phase, we don’t discuss it.
” She waves her free hand. “The point is, you with him and Maddox and Asher? It makes sense to me. You got Uncle Mad Max to slow down. To stay in one place longer than a playlist. Do you know how many times that man has canceled on us over the years because he had somewhere else to be? And now he’s here, like actually here, all the time, because of you. ”
Something in my chest does a thing I wasn’t expecting it to do and I have to look at my salad for a second.
“And Uncle Asher,” she continues, gentler now, like she knows this one lands differently.
“He’s himself again. Not the version of himself he was with Monica, that stiff, walking-on-eggshells version that used to show up to family dinners and make everything feel like it was being performed for someone who wasn’t even in the room.
Like, the man cooks with his whole body, you know?
He leans into it, he tastes as he goes, he feeds people because it’s how he loves them, and with Monica he was asking permission before he did anything. That’s not Asher.”
“No,” I agree quietly, thinking of every midnight kitchen, every plate that appeared without being asked for. “It’s not.”
“And not the version after either,” she says, “when he was just this quiet existential whatever, going through the motions of his own life. He’s him. The real one. And that’s because of you, Harper.”
I look up at her and my throat is doing something inconvenient.
“And you,” she says, and her voice goes soft in the way it does when she’s being completely serious, which with Sophia is rare enough that I feel it land.
“Harper. You’re my ride or die. You’re the person I called when my life was a disaster and you showed up every single time without making me feel like a disaster for needing you.
And now you’re the mother of my little nugget.
” She squeezes my hands again. “This is good. This is real happiness and you deserve this. Every messy, complicated, infuriating part of it.”
I laugh and it comes out wetter than I meant it to. “I’m not going to cry in your stockroom.”
“You’re absolutely going to cry in my stockroom and I’m going to let you because I also might be crying a little and it’s my stockroom so the rules are mine.”
We sit there for a moment, both of us pretending we’re not doing exactly what we’re doing, and it’s the most normal and complete I’ve felt since all of this started.
“I was so scared to tell you,” I admit.
“I know.” She tilts her head. “Dad told me, by the way. A while ago. He didn’t exactly have a choice, but he also didn’t fight very hard to keep it from me, so I think he wanted me to know.”
“Yeah, I heard about the ultrasound frames situation.”
“They’re framed in my suite and the boutique and I have one in my bag at all times.”
“Sophia.”
“Big Sis Sophia is a whole identity and I’m stepping into it fully.”
I laugh for real this time, the kind that comes all the way up from somewhere, and she laughs with me, and for a long minute the stockroom is just us, the sandwich wrappers, the little lamp, and about six months of a conversation we should have had sooner.
Enzo knocks on the doorframe, wearing the expression of a man who has been waiting very patiently for two women to finish something he couldn’t interrupt.
“Um. Sorry. There’s a customer out front and she wants to know about the strappy set versus the lace set and I just. I don’t have the vocabulary for that conversation.”
Sophia stands immediately, brushing crumbs off her lap with the efficiency of someone who has been waiting for a reason to go back and fix the display. “I’ll handle it. You two can finish eating.”
She’s gone before he can respond, heels sharp on the floor, and Enzo steps fully into the office doorway and watches her go with the expression he gets when she’s not looking at him, which is the most honest expression I’ve ever seen on his face.
“So,” he says, turning back to me, hands in his pockets, something in his posture shifting into a version of himself that isn’t the Lorenzo who manages logistics and refers to wine by its terroir. “You’re pregnant by Killian, Asher, and Maddox.”
“One of them,” I say. “But yes, we’re raising them together.”
He nods slowly, taking that in the way he takes in most large pieces of information, steadily, like he’s checking it against a mental framework before responding. Then he steps a little further into the office and lowers his voice.
“Do you mind if I ask you something? And I need this to stay in this room.”
I straighten slightly. “Of course.”
“I want to ask Killian for his blessing.”
My jaw drops. Not dramatically, not performed, just genuinely falls open for a second because even though I knew how Lorenzo feels about Sophia, the sentence lands with all the weight it carries.
“Enzo,” I say, and I’m already out of my chair and hugging him before I’ve fully processed standing up. He laughs, a little startled, and hugs me back.
“Ssh,” he says, patting my shoulder. “You know how she is. I can’t keep a secret from her for long, but I just need a few days.”
“She doesn’t suspect anything?”
“She’s Sophia. She suspects everything and then dismisses it because she thinks she already knows the answer.
” He pulls back and looks at me with a slight grimace of a smile.
“I was thinking, you know, since you’re Killian’s, uh, baby mama, now.
That maybe having you there would make him less likely to make it a whole thing. ”
I look at Enzo, who is a genuinely lovely person and who clearly does not know Killian as well as he thinks he does, and I smile with all the warmth I have available.
“Absolutely,” I tell him. “Just say when and where.”
He exhales with relief and I nod encouragingly and I do not tell him that Killian is going to make it a whole thing regardless of whether I’m standing right next to him, because that’s between Lorenzo and whatever’s coming for him, and also some things you just have to let a person discover for themselves.
From out front, I hear Sophia explaining the difference between strappy and lace in a tone that suggests she has opinions about this that go beyond the customer’s question, and Enzo straightens up and says, “I should probably go help,” with the look of a man who has decided to walk into something knowing exactly what it is.
I sit back down with my salad and smile at nothing in particular.
My best friend is going to be so surprised.