“Thai,” Sawyer said immediately.
I blinked. “You just?—”
“I know,” he said, smug. “You both want Thai. Don’t argue with me.”
Ford laughed. “He’s right. Thai it is.”
We did the whole dance—what we wanted, who was ordering, the small negotiations that meant nobody had to make a decision alone. Ford grabbed his phone, put in the order, and then we settled in like this was what we’d always done.
Like life hadn’t sunk its teeth into all of us at one point or another.
I tried to settle into the couch and let my shoulders drop. Tried to feel the cushion under me, the bottle in my hand, the familiar weight of my friends in the room.
Because I knew they’d note my distraction and ask sooner or later, I took the offensive, looking to Sawyer. “What’s going on in your world?”
His mouth quirked. “Well,” he said slowly, like he was about to announce he’d joined a cult or taken up interpretive dance, “looks like I get to get used to the pitter patter of little feet.”
Ford and I both stared at him.
The words landed in my head like a grenade.
“Holy shit,” Ford said at the same time I said, “Is Willa pregnant?”
Sawyer barked a laugh and shook his head. “She is not.”
My lungs started working again.
“She’s taking on a new foster dog,” Sawyer went on, like he hadn’t just casually spiked all our blood pressure. “I don’t think either of us is quite ready for the human variety of pitter patter. And if we are, we can always borrow Peyton.”
Ford made a noise that was half laugh, half wounded dad. “She’s fourteen,” he bemoaned. “My kid is a full-blown teenager.”
“And a truly awesome kid,” Sawyer said, no hesitation.
Ford’s expression softened in a way that made my chest ache. “She really is.”
I took another swallow of beer and let myself smile. “Hopefully, she’ll get in a little less trouble than we did at that age.”
Sawyer’s brows lifted. “That’s a low bar.”
Ford pointed at me like I’d personally offended him. “She absolutely maxed out my capacity for handling trouble when she conducted a murder investigation last spring. She’s toeing the line.”
I huffed a laugh before I could stop it. “Still can’t believe you let her out of the house after all that.”
“I considered putting her in an ankle monitor. Bree insisted that was overkill,” Ford grumped.
Sawyer’s gaze slid to me, not pushing, just… there. “Speaking of investigations, dare we ask how the case is going?”
There it was.
I’d known it was coming. These were my people. They weren’t going to pretend my life hadn’t been eaten by something ugly.
“Slow.” Anything but blunt honesty would be a lie. “We’re pretty sure it’s bigger than Priya.”
Ford’s posture shifted, a fraction more alert. Sawyer’s expression sharpened, but his voice stayed calm. “What makes you think that?”
I gave them the bones of it—how it had come into focus, how the pieces had started to suggest something wider. Not the kind of details that would turn this into a briefing—because I needed the escape of just hanging with them. Just enough that they understood why my nerves were still humming under my skin.
Ford’s jaw worked. “Fuck.”
