Chapter Twenty-Six—Ethan
I'm already at the table when they arrive, nursing a black coffee and watching the brunch crowd.
Andrew is four minutes late. Liam is seven. Typical timing.
The rooftop is loud in the best way. Mimosas clink, laughter rolls across tables, music under the midday sun. Perfect. Noise like this lets three men talk about heavy things without anyone overhearing.
I booked the spot last night for exactly that reason. Somewhere away from the apartment. Somewhere Riley has no reason to appear.
I chose this particular table out of habit. Good sight lines. Enough distance from the next group. Controllable variables.
I am aware that is a problem. I've decided to table it for now.
Liam drops into the chair across from me and picks up the menu. He looks at it for three seconds, sets it back down.
“Did you pre-read the menu?”
“The eggs Benedict has good reviews.”
Andrew sits. He's got the look of someone who didn't sleep a full night but doesn't want anyone to notice. Dark circles. He was wearing sunglasses when he came through the door. He takes them off when he sits down.
I respect that.
“How is she?” Liam asks.
Andrew considers it. “Okay. I think okay.”
Nobody says good. We all know the difference.
The server comes. Liam orders the eggs benedict. Andrew gets coffee and stares at the menu without reading it. I order a western omelet with bacon and wait.
“I'll start,” I say.
Liam raises an eyebrow. “You rehearsed this.”
“I thought through what needed to be said.”
“Same thing.”
“It's not.”
Andrew wraps both hands around his coffee mug. “Let him talk.”
I set my phone face-down on the table.
“We need to establish what we're doing. The part we can actually decide.”
Neither of them argues.
“No competition,” I say. “No one tracking who she spends more time with or what it means. That stops now, or we're already done before we start.”
Liam nods once.
Andrew nods once.
“No hierarchy. Not by how long you've known her. Not by who the test comes back for.”
Because hierarchy breaks teams.
I've seen it happen before. Men who think they rank above each other stop protecting the group. Start protecting position.
That gets people hurt.
We're not doing that here.
Andrew goes still. Just for a second. Like he hadn't expected to hear it said out loud.
“The baby is all of ours,” I say. “Whatever the test says. That's not a maybe. That's not something we revisit when the answer is inconvenient.”
A pause while it lands.
Just the beat that follows when someone finally names the thing already sitting in the room.
Liam looks at me. “You've been thinking about this since the beginning.”
“Since the morning after she told us.”
“You didn't say anything.”
“I needed to know you'd both show up first.”
Andrew sets down his mug. “We're here.”
“You are.”
That's all that needs to be said about that.
The food arrives. Liam eats. Andrew drinks coffee. I manage half of mine before my phone buzzes against the table, face-down. I flip it over. Work email, nothing urgent. I set it back.
“Harrington dinner is in two days,” I say.
Liam's expression holds but his eyes go flat. That's the tell with him. Just for a second.
“I know,” he says.
“We need to be steady in that room. All three of us.”
“We're always steady in that room.”
“This is the first time we're walking in carrying this. It changes what we’re holding in check while we’re in there.”
Andrew turns his coffee mug in a slow circle on the tablecloth.
“You think they'll notice something's off?”
“I think Harrington's people notice everything. So we make sure we give them nothing they can use against us.” I pull up my email. “His assistant sent a standard follow-up yesterday.”
I read it aloud.
Following up on the closing timeline. The group has a few questions about the current partnership structure and long-term stability.
I look up.
Liam reads the word stability the way he reads most things from Harrington's team. Like a man who's been in actual combat zones and has run entirely out of patience for boardroom games.
“Stability,” he says.
“That's the word they used.”
“We go in together,” I say. “We close the dinner. We walk out with the deal intact.”
“Fine,” Liam says.
Andrew nods once.
We eat. Or Liam eats, Andrew drinks coffee, and I rearrange food on my plate without making much progress.
Getting out of the penthouse only solved one problem. It got us somewhere loud enough to talk freely. It didn't fix the part where we still have to go back.
Riley is in the apartment right now. Or she's not.
Maybe she's at the coffee shop two blocks over.
Or walking somewhere with her headphones in.
She's good at building small exits into her days.
I've noticed how she does it, the quiet engineering of it.
A reason to step out. A place to go. Just in case she needs to leave in a hurry.
I keep doing that. Noticing things and filing them away.
It's going to be a problem if I don't stop.
I have a Thursday standing dinner in LA I’ve moved every week since we got here. A message from a colleague I keep meaning to return. I haven’t rescheduled any of it. I’m starting to think I won’t.
“Can I say something,” Andrew says.
“You're going to anyway,” Liam says.
“I don't want us to run this like a business problem.” He looks at both of us.
“I know how Ethan thinks. And I know it works.
But she needs to know where she stands. Not just from me.
From all three of us, together. She's got three separate conversations and her own head filling in the gaps between them.”
He's not wrong.
Riley Monroe does not do well with incomplete information. I've watched her operate for weeks. Give her a gap and she fills it with the worst available option every time. I've seen her talk herself out of something good in real time without noticing.
“We tell her together,” I say. “After the dinner.”
Because she deserves to hear it once, not three different ways.
“Ethan—”
“Two days. We get through the Harrington table, and then we sit down with her. All three of us. No more separate conversations.”
Liam looks at Andrew. Something passes between them. Then Liam nods.
“Two days,” he says.
My phone buzzes.
I pick it up. Read it. Read it again because the first pass didn't sit right.
Connor: Hey. Hope all is well. Back in Vegas in two weeks. Looking forward to seeing everyone.
I set the phone on the table between us.
Both of them lean forward.
“Two weeks,” Andrew says.
“Two weeks.”
Two weeks to build something strong enough not to break when Connor walks through the door.
Liam sits back. His hand goes to the back of his neck. He's running the same numbers I am. Investor dinner in two days. The conversation with Riley after. Paternity results pending. The situation still unfolding.
And Connor landing at the end of all of it with no idea what he's walking into.
“We're not ready,” Andrew says.
“We don't get to decide that.”
Liam's eyes move to mine. He's already shifted. I've seen it happen before—the moment a manageable situation becomes the real version of itself. He gets quieter. More focused. The part of him that trained for this while on two tours and knows how to hold ground when everything else is moving.
“Okay,” he says.
Just that.
Andrew picks up his coffee. Sets it back down without drinking.
The three of us look at each other across the table.
Two weeks.
The clock just started.