Chapter Fourteen—Liam
Riley is at the kitchen island at seven-thirty with a glass of water and the expression of someone trying very hard to look like everything is fine.
I clock it in about four seconds.
“You're not eating,” I say, dropping onto the stool across from her.
“I'm about to eat.”
“You've been about to eat for twenty minutes. I've been watching from the couch.”
She looks up. “That's not creepy at all.”
“I'm observant.” I reach across and steal one of the crackers off her plate. The plate she's been extremely committed to not touching. “Former military. It's a gift.”
“Is that what you're calling it?”
“Among other things.” I lean on the counter, close enough that she'd have to move to put more distance between us. I'm not doing it on purpose. Mostly.
She notices. Her shoulders come back, chin lifting slightly. Not moving away, putting something careful in her posture. Six weeks of keeping precise distance and her body still remembers exactly how close I can get.
“Liam.”
“Riley.”
“We said—”
“I know what we said.” I don't move. “I'm just stealing crackers.”
She looks at me how she looks at things she doesn't entirely trust. Which, fair. I never claimed to be entirely trustworthy.
“How's the Mercer project?” I ask, giving her the out.
She takes it. “Fine. Boring. The client is making annoying requests. He wants to redo their entire brand in Comic Sans.”
“And you're telling them no.”
“I'm telling them gently.” The corner of her mouth moves. Almost the real version. “With examples.”
There she is. She knows I like that version best, which is probably why she keeps it on a short leash around me.
“I haven’t been feeling well lately.”
“Mm.” I tilt my head and take her in slowly. A look that's just this side of inappropriate, and we both know it. “Funny thing about that.”
“Don't.”
“You look pretty good for someone who's been sick a lot lately.”
She blinks. Then, despite herself: “Did you just compliment me to prove a point?”
“I compliment you constantly. You just usually change the subject before it lands.”
“Liam—”
“I'm serious.” I hold her gaze, easy, unhurried. “You look good, Riley. You always look good. It's genuinely inconvenient.”
Something flickers across her face—the armor slipping for exactly one second before she pulls it back up. She reaches for her water glass, takes a long sip, and sets it down with the particular precision of someone buying time.
“We're not doing this,” she says.
“Doing what?”
“This.” She gestures vaguely between us. “We agreed.”
“We agreed on a lot of things.” I lean back, arms crossed. “Doesn't mean it's not true. You look good. Also, you're clearly not fine. Both things can be real at the same time.”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks back at her water—and the set of her jaw tells me she's holding something back.
Living together teaches you things about people they don’t have to share.
I take out the recycling an hour later—Ethan asked, I said sure—and I've got the bag tied at the top, halfway to the door, when a shape through the plastic stops me.
Angular. About the size of a small box.
I set the bag back down.
Untie it.
Not sure why. Some instinct that came back from two tours intact when many others didn’t.
Something is wrong. My grip tightens on the plastic bag.
I've never been good at walking away from that.
The box is at the bottom, half-covered by a piece of torn cardboard. Small. White. Packaging that's clinical.
Pregnancy test.
I hold it.
One of those moments where your brain needs to catch up to what your hands already know.
It explains everything. The water. The untouched food. The not feeling well. She’s been covering and working overtime to keep the performance running.
The fact that she’s been carrying this alone lands first. Not the rest of it—just that. We could have been taking care of her.
I've spent weeks telling myself the rooftop was one night we all agreed to leave alone. I've been very convincing about it. It's a skill.
But I'm standing in a trash room holding a pregnancy test and I can't find the joke.
That's how I know.
I stop myself.
I know how it feels when the person running point misses the thing that matters. I know it exactly.
Then the rest of it hits.
Three men.
Could be mine.
The thought lands heavier than it should.
Or exactly as heavy as it should.
I set the box down on the counter.
Look at it.
Pick it up again.
I was there. Six weeks ago—the rooftop, the champagne, the night that got filed under mistake in the group consensus and under something else entirely in my actual chest. I was there.
Ethan was there. Andrew was there. And none of us have talked about it since, which felt like the right call at the time.
Doesn't anymore.
I place the cardboard back on top, exactly how it was. Retie the bag. Same knot.
I stand there with the recycling at my feet and the silence of a penthouse where no one knows what I just found.
I could walk down the hall right now. Knock on her door. Tell her I know and ask her to talk to me, because that's what I do—I make it easy, I keep things light, I've spent years being the person in the room who doesn't make things worse. I'm good at it.
But she put that box under the cardboard for a reason.
She's not ready.
I pick up the bag and take it to the trash room and come back and stand in the kitchen for another minute, thinking about the look on her face forty minutes ago when I told her she looked good. The half-second before the armor came back up. Under it—fear.
Not annoyance.
I pull out my phone.
I type it three times before I send it.
The first version asks if she's okay. Too direct—she'll close up before she's finished reading it. The second says we should talk, the exact combination of words designed to make Riley Monroe evaporate into her room and not come out until Tuesday. The third is just:
Dinner tonight. Just us?
I read it twice. Hit send before I talk myself into a fourth draft.
I don't tell Ethan. I thought about it—stood in the hallway outside his office for about thirty seconds, listening to the click of his keyboard, running the math on whether two sets of eyes would help or whether he'd approach this how he approaches everything and she'd feel cornered before the appetizers arrived.
Ethan is good at a lot of things. Getting people to lower their guard is not one of them.
This one needs to be easy. Dinner, just the two of us, the version of me she doesn't guard against.
It's not entirely a tactic. I want to take her to dinner. I've wanted to take her to dinner for weeks, which is its own problem I've been trying not to look at too closely.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Three dots.
I watch them. They appear, disappear, appear again—she's typing and deleting, which tells me more than the message will.
Then.
Riley: Sure.
One word. No follow-up, no what are you thinking or are Ethan and Andrew coming?—she just said yes, which means either she wants the company or she's been waiting for someone to give her an opening she couldn't make herself.
I'm counting on the second one.
I set the phone down and look at the kitchen—the island where she sat an hour ago pushing crackers around, the water glass still there, the wine bottle untouched.
Six weeks ago she said yes on a rooftop and none of us have talked about what happened since. We agreed it was a mistake and we meant it, or we tried to mean it, and somewhere in the six weeks between that morning and this one Riley has been quietly falling apart and not telling anyone.
I'm not letting her do this alone.
Not the whole thing—I'm not naive enough to think one dinner fixes whatever this is. But she said sure, and she's sitting across a table from me in an hour, and by the time the check comes I'll know enough to figure out what comes next.