The sound of my phone cuts through the quiet like a crack of thunder.
I glance down at the screen without thinking, expecting Carlie or a number I don’t recognize. My stomach drops when I see the name instead.
David.
I don’t move right away. I just stare at it, the familiar dread flooding my system so fast it makes me dizzy. I swallow and answer. “Hello.”
“Harper.”
“What do you want?” I ask, keeping my voice flat.
“Nice to hear from you too,” David says. His tone is casual, practiced, the way it always is when he thinks he has the upper hand. “I heard you’re shacking up with some guy in Columbus.”
My grip tightens on the phone. “My living situation is none of your business.”
“It is when our kid is involved,” he replies smoothly. “I’m coming to get Mason this weekend. We need to talk about the custody arrangement.”
“We have a schedule. You don’t get to change it. One weekend a month that we agree on the month before, a week in the summer, and one of the major holidays.”
“I get to interrupt the schedule when I think something’s not safe,” David counters. “It’s bad enough that you’re running some trashy bar and exposing Mason to who knows what there?—”
“For God’s sake, we have a kids’ menu, David! It’s not a strip club. Calm down!” Rage flares hot and fast, but underneath it is fear. Real fear. The kind that crawls under your skin and sinks its teeth in. “It’s perfectly safe!”
“You had a fire, Harper. That’s not safe for my son!”
“You don’t get to use this against me,” I say through clenched teeth. “Any building can have a fire.”
“I’m not using anything,” he replies. “I’m being a parent. You should try it sometime.”
Behind me, I hear Aiden move. I don’t turn around, but I know he’s there. Can’t focus on him. “You’re being an ass again, David. You don’t get to pick apart the life I’m building for us when you’re not even around to help with Mason.”
“I’ll be around,” David continues. “In person. This weekend.”
“Expect a call from my lawyer.”
He laughs quietly. “Right.” The line goes dead.
I lower the phone slowly, my hands shaking now that I’m no longer forcing them steady. The penthouse feels suddenly smaller, the walls pressing in.
Aiden’s voice is low when he speaks. “What happened?”
I close my eyes for a moment before looking at him. “David’s coming to visit with Mason this weekend.” Suddenly, keeping my heart out of this feels a lot less important than keeping my son safe.
AIDEN
Jealousy is an ugly thing to carry around, especially when you know you don’t have the right to it.
David is Mason’s father. No matter how much my jaw tightens every time his name comes up, no matter how badly I want to rewrite that fact, it doesn’t change. He has rights. He has history. He has a claim that I will never have, no matter how much time I spend making pancakes with his kid or taking him to school in the mornings.
Knowing that doesn’t make it easier.
What I do have, for now, is proximity. Routine. A fragile kind of normal that settles over the penthouse during the week and makes everything feel deceptively steady. Mason pads into the kitchen every morning in socked feet, hair sticking up in directions that defy physics, and insists on helping me make breakfast. He cracks eggs with too much enthusiasm and takes his role very seriously.
Harper hovers at first, then backs off when she realizes I’m not going to let him get hurt. She insists on folding laundry that doesn’t need folding or wiping down counters that are already clean. I recognize it for what it is—her way of asserting control, of reminding herself that she’s not a guest in her own life.
On my way to work, I take Mason to school. He talks the entire drive, narrating his day before it’s even started, peppering me with questions about engines and Argyle. “Do you ever get scared in a fire?”
“Of course.”
