For the first time in longer than I could remember, the world was perfect.
Even if it only lasted a single night.
Chapter Seven
~ Jai ~
I always woke up just before Grace started. She had a two-stage alarm: first, the low-level fussy mewl that was all throat and no lungs, a sound I’d learned to clock at exactly ninety seconds before the main event. Then, if you missed the window, she went to Defcon One.
This morning, my traitor brain fired before the mewl. I snapped upright in the dark, hand already out for the bassinet, the muscle memory of seven years’ worth of pre-dawn stand-tos merged with a month of baby science.
The crib sat in the guest suite’s east window, frame so pale it glowed against the black walnut floors. The city behind the glass was nothing—just a matte smear of cold blue, except where Mt. Hood caught the sunrise and threw it back like a threat.
Grace started winding up, feet kicking under the swaddle, head thrashing side to side in a move that would’ve looked violent if she weighed more than a sandwich. I caught her before the volume tripled, scooped her to my chest, and ran the quick diagnostic: dry, hungry, not leaking from any orifice.
The basics.
Out in the hall, the air was cold enough to give me a static charge. The penthouse had two modes: perfectly curated and waiting to be lived in, or haunted. At this hour, it was haunted.
I padded barefoot over the hardwood, Grace cradled in my left arm, and made for the kitchen by sonar—no lights, just the city’s dim and a weird second sense for other people’s expensive furniture.
The kitchen came up like a punchline: black marble island, two barstools, a bottle warmer the size of a food processor,and the faint afterimage of an argument I’d had with the coffee machine the night before.
I landed at the island, popped the hood light, and set Grace on the bouncy seat the housekeeper had magicked up overnight. She didn’t like it, but she tolerated, and for her, that was basically true love.
I ran the formula one-handed, Grace’s fist welded to my thumb, and flicked the powder into the bottle like I’d been doing it for years instead of days. The hot water pitcher hissed. The bouncy seat’s metal springs creaked every time Grace flailed a limb. The rest was silence, except for the white noise of the city, forty floors below.
Somewhere in the process, I registered my own reflection in the glass behind the kitchen sink. Sweatpants, faded t-shirt, cherry-sucker-red stain on the left shoulder, and a stubble situation that made me look like a criminal on the run.
Grace, on the other hand, looked like the world’s angriest snow pea, all pink face and sharp-edged squint, the fury of evolutionary necessity burning out of her skull.
I tested the bottle’s temp against the inside of my wrist. Perfect. Slotted the nipple into her mouth, watched the jaw flex, and let her do the rest. Instant silence. The kind that echoes.
Braham entered with zero warning. One moment, it was just me, the baby, and the ghost of last night’s conversation. Next, the air shifted, and there he was: suit, tie, lapel pin, every hair in place. He looked like the CEO of Time, Inc., come to audit my performance in fatherhood.
He didn’t speak. Just leaned one shoulder against the doorway and folded his arms, watching the bottle angle up and down in Grace’s mouth.
“Do you sleep?” I said, not turning around.
He arched a brow. “Do you?”
Touché.
I shifted Grace to my right arm, freeing the left to finish prepping the backup bottle. “She prefers her bottles at exactly body temp. I tried to explain how unreasonable that is, but she’s very set in her ways.”
He let the joke hang. “She gets it from you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
He didn’t move, didn’t fidget, just watched me. It should have been unnerving, but after two days in his orbit, I’d stopped expecting personal space.
I ran out of things to do with my hands, so I gestured with the bottle. “You want to hold her?”
He blinked, once, slow. “Will she tolerate it?”
“Only one way to find out.” I stood there, arm outstretched, waiting for him to cross the gap.
Braham moved. He did it with a kind of predatory precision that was more attractive than I wanted to admit. He took Grace from me with both hands, index and middle finger forming a shelf at the base of her neck, palm perfectly supporting her back. He cradled her like he’d been coached by a Navy SEAL in infant extraction.
