Chapter 26 Ethan
ETHAN
Silence has a weight.
In the military, silence usually means one of two things: safety or an ambush.
You learn to distinguish the difference by the hairs on the back of your neck.
Safety feels like a vacuum, a total lack of input.
An ambush feels like a sudden drop in barometric pressure—the air heavy and vibrating, waiting for the trigger to be pulled.
For the last forty-eight hours, the silence coming from Tessa has felt like a goddamn ambush.
I sit in my office, staring out the glass walls that offer a panoramic view of the Mosaic floor.
It’s buzzing with the frantic energy of a startup that just secured fifty million dollars but sold its soul to get it.
We’re one month post-launch, but the workload hasn’t slowed down—it’s doubled.
Developers are huddled in pods, finalizing the infrastructure scaling infrastructure for the Confessions feature, an anonymous posting tool that Sterling wants us to push aggressively.
But the one person who usually anchors the chaos is missing.
Tessa isn’t gone, technically. She’s in the building. I know she’s physically present because Asher tracks everyone’s badge-ins like a hawk, and Owen mentioned seeing her grab a bagel in the break room at seven this morning.
But she’s actively avoiding us.
She’s methodical about it, making sure it isn’t the kind of avoidance that would trigger an HR complaint or alert the rest of the staff. She replies to emails with one-word answers. Approved. Reviewed. Pending.
In the encrypted group chat—our absolute lifeline, the place where we’ve built this insane, beautiful, terrifying dynamic—she’s gone completely dark. No memes. No snarky comments about my tie. No “Red or Black?” callbacks.
I stare down at the paperwork on my desk—the Sterling contract, a fifty-million-dollar lifeline that currently feels exactly like a noose.
The Morality Clause stares back at me, specifically Section 4.
2 regarding “conduct unbecoming of executive leadership” and “deviant lifestyle choices that may negatively impact the brand image.”
We signed it. We agreed to hide what we were doing, and exactly what we are to each other, to save the company and the employees out there who have mortgages and families.
But ever since the ink dried, Tessa has been ghosting us.
Is she regretting it?
A harsh tightness grips my chest, and I clench my jaw until my molars grind together.
Is the reality of hiding us too much? Have the reckless afternoons we spent tangled in her bed, the stolen nights in her apartment, and the desperate quickies in the server room lost their shine now that a billionaire investor is explicitly threatening to bankrupt us if we get caught?
My door opens without a knock. Owen drops heavily into the chair opposite my desk. He clearly hasn’t slept. His usual easy-going charm—that golden-retriever energy that actively balances out my cynicism—is completely gone. The edges of his composure are fraying.
“She’s canceling the lunch meeting,” Owen says.
“Which lunch meeting?” I ask, keeping my voice level.
“The strategy sync for the Confessions expansion. She sent a calendar update two minutes ago and changed it to an email update.” Owen drags his palms down his face, distorting his features. “She hasn’t looked me in the eye since Wednesday morning, E. She’s dodging me.”
“She’s dodging us,” Asher corrects from the doorway.
My brother stands there leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. His expression is as stoic as ever, but I know what he says. He’s tapping his fingers against his bicep in a rhythmic Fibonacci sequence, which he only does when he’s trying to solve a problem that lacks a logical solution.
“I checked the network logs,” Asher says, walking in and closing the door to seal the three of us in the soundproof glass box.
“Her productivity metrics are steady, but her communication output with the three of us has dropped by ninety-four percent in the last forty-eight hours. Physically, she’s isolating herself.
I walked past the bullpen, and she’s keeping her head down with her noise-canceling headphones clamped on, completely refusing to engage. ”
“Jesus, Ash,” Owen snaps. “She isn’t a server crash. You can’t debug her.”
“I’m just stating the data,” Asher replies, though his voice lacks its usual detached cool. “The metrics suggest a pattern of withdrawal consistent with…” He trails off, frowning.
“With what?” I ask, my voice sharpening.
“Regret,” Asher finishes quietly.
The word hangs in the air, heavy and suffocating.
Owen stands up, aggressively pacing the small strip of carpet in front of my desk.
“I don’t buy it. We were… we were perfect the other night.
After we signed the deal? That night at her apartment?
That wasn't regret. That was…” He struggles for the word, his hands flexing.
“That was everything. She was happy. We were a family.”
“People change their minds when the adrenaline wears off,” I say, the hardwired pessimist in me rising to the surface.
It’s my job to protect them. It’s my job to anticipate the worst-case scenario so it doesn’t completely kill us.
“The Sterling deal makes this real, and it makes it dangerous. Maybe she realized the risk isn’t worth the reward. ”
“We’re the reward,” Owen shoots back, his green eyes flashing. “We’re worth it.”
“Are we?” I ask, leaning back in my chair.
“Look at us, Owen. We’ve dragged her into a situation where she could lose her career, her reputation, and her best friend if this gets out.
Maybe she finally woke up and realized that sleeping with three brothers isn’t a modern fairy tale—it’s a massive scandal waiting to happen. ”
“Don’t say that,” Owen warns, his voice dropping.
“I’m looking at the strategic landscape,” I say, heavily channeling the CEO persona because it’s significantly easier than being the terrified man in love. “If she wants out, we have to let her go. We can’t force this. We agreed from the start: if she ever wanted to stop, we stop.”
“She hasn’t actually said she wants to stop,” Asher interjects. “She’s just… silent.”
“She looks genuinely sick, too,” Owen adds, pivoting. “Have you seen her? She’s incredibly pale and she looks exhausted. Maybe she’s just coming down with a virus and doesn’t want to get us sick before the board meeting next week.”
“She explicitly refused medical help,” Asher notes. “I offered to bring her tea yesterday when I saw her rubbing her temples at her desk. She told me she was fine and asked me to leave her alone.”
“She’s actively pushing us away,” I say, lacing finality into my tone. “And if we forcefully push back right now while she’s clearly struggling with whatever this is, we’ll break her.”
I look at my brothers. They’re waiting for orders. That’s our fundamental dynamic. We’re a democracy behind closed doors, but when it comes to survival, they look to me to call the play.
“We give her space,” I command.
Owen opens his mouth to protest, but I instantly cut him off.
“I mean it, Owen. No cornering her in the break room. No accidental run-ins at the elevator. No blowing up her phone. If she needs distance to process the Sterling contract or the reality of us, we give it to her. We focus on the work. We have to prove to Sterling that the Confessions module can handle the new user load. If we screw that up, the Morality Clause won’t matter because there won’t be a company left to save. ”
Owen looks utterly gutted. He sinks back into the chair, violently scrubbing his face with his hands. “It feels completely wrong, Ethan. It feels like leaving a man behind.”
“She isn’t a soldier,” I say softly, the harshness fading from my voice. “She’s the woman we love. And right now, she’s building a wall. If we try to smash through it, we’re just proving that we don’t respect her boundaries.”
Asher nods slowly. “It tracks. If the system is unstable, adding pressure just forces a crash. We have to stabilize the environment first.”
“Exactly,” I say, though the word tastes like ash in my mouth. “We focus on Mosaic. We let her come to us.”
Owen lets out a long, frustrated breath. “Fine. But I don’t like it. It feels like the beginning of the end.”
“Get back to work,” I order, dismissing them because I can’t handle Owen’s emotional intuition right now. If he keeps talking, he’ll make me break my own command.
They leave, Owen dragging his feet while Asher walks with purposeful, mechanical strides.
When the door clicks shut, I swivel my chair toward the window, staring blankly out over the Austin skyline.
Give her space.
It’s the right call tacitcally. It’s the mature, respectful thing to do. So why does every primal instinct in my body scream at me to march down to her desk and demand to know why she’s looking at me like I’m a total stranger?
I unlock my phone, pulling up the encrypted group chat.
Tessa: Not home yet. Just walking around to get air. I’ll let you know when I’m back.
That was it. Wednesday afternoon. Two full days ago. Since then, absolute radio silence.
I scroll up, actively torturing myself. Photos of her smiling. Jokes about Asher’s robotic coffee orders. A blurry selfie of the four of us tangled in sheets, taken by Owen, which we should absolutely not have on a cloud server, but none of us could bring ourselves to delete.
I lock the phone and toss it onto the desk with a hard clatter.
Focus, Branson.
I pull the Sterling file closer. The Morality Clause isn’t the only headache.
There are operational discrepancies Asher flagged earlier this morning—minor server latency issues in the Confessions module.
It’s likely just a load-balancing hiccup from the influx of new users, but with the investors watching our every move, everything has to be flawless.