“I’ll do my best.”
My dad has been quiet through all of this, eating his cake and watching Logan with the unreadable expression he’s perfected over thirty years of single parenting. Now he sets down his spoon and fixes Logan with a look.
“You treating my daughter right?”
Logan meets his gaze steadily. “Yes, sir. Or at least, I’m trying to. She deserves better than right, though. She deserves perfect. I’m working on it.”
Dad considers this. Then he nods once, a gesture so small you’d miss it if you weren’t watching.
“Good answer.” He picks up his spoon again. “Have some more cake.”
I let out a slow breath. That’s as close to approval as my dad gives on a first meeting. Logan seems to understand this instinctively because something in his shoulders relaxes.
The conversation shifts—my brothers telling stories about the auto shop they run together, Dad complaining about his back, Tony’s ongoing feud with his neighbor over a property line. It’s loud and chaotic and occasionally crude, everything Logan’s world probably isn’t. But he’s leaning in, listening, laughing at the right moments. He asks Mike about the transmission problem he’s been dealing with, and they spend ten minutes in a technical discussion that impresses even my dad.
I watch him, this man I’m falling for, as he navigates my family with the careful attention of an anthropologist discovering a new tribe—one he genuinely wants to understand. He’s trying so hard. And not in a performative way. In agenuine, I-want-these-people-to-like-me-because-they-matter-to-you way.
Something warm blooms in my chest.
I’m so caught up in watching Logan charm my disaster of a family that I almost forget the panic of the morning. I even start to relax, just a little, until I notice Tony’s face stretching into the grin he used to get right before feeding our neighbor’s goldfish an entire bottle of glitter.
“So, Logan,” Tony says, “Audrey tells us you’re working on some top-secret brain surgery thing. Is this, like, cyberpunk neural implants or that weird monkey stuff from Elon Musk?”
Logan actually laughs. “Nothing that dramatic. It’s a brain implant, but not for mind-reading or controlling Twitter with your thoughts.” He glances at me as if checking for clearance. I nod.
He explains with surprising fluency and non-nerd vocabulary, talking about ‘biocompatibility’ and ‘minimally invasive,’ sidestepping the medical jargon that would normally shut down the average family breakfast. My brothers are eating this up—Logan is smart but not condescending, self-deprecating without being weak. He makes a joke about neural enhancers improving Tony’s beer pong accuracy, and even my ultra-jaded big brother cackles. It’s weirdly heartwarming watching the men who raised me start to see Logan as a person and not just a potential threat.
When they leave—late, loud, reeking of too much aftershave and the strawberry syrup from the cake—they leave us with a kitchen wrecked from celebration and too much sugar and caffeine. Logan is sitting at the table, back to the window, sunlight defining every awkward angle of his posture.
He’s still wearing the pink GIRLS IN STEM shirt. He doesn’t seem to mind.
I drop into the chair across from him, exhausted in the best possible way. “So. You survived the Greenes.”
“Barely.” But he’s smiling. “They’re... a lot.”
“Too much?”
He shakes his head, something soft in his expression. “No. They’re perfect. Loud and chaotic and completely incapable of boundaries—but perfect.” He reaches across the table and takes my hand. “I can see where you get it from.”
“Get what?”
“The loyalty. The fierceness. The way you show up for people, even when it’s inconvenient.” His thumb traces my knuckles. “You’re a Greene through and through.”
My throat tightens unexpectedly. “Careful. Keep talking like that and I might start to think you actually like me.”
“I more than like you, Audrey.” He says it simply, like a fact. Like gravity. “Happy birthday.”
And despite everything—the interrupted morning, the ambush, the ice cream cake slowly becoming soup on my counter—I smile.
“Thanks for being here,” I say. “For all of it.”
“Nowhere else I’d rather be.”
CHAPTER 20
Audrey
The silence after a Greene family invasion is a specific kind of quiet—the shell-shocked calm of survivors assessing the damage.
