Page 127 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

She's quiet for a second. “I moved there because I didn't know what else to do.” She says it like she's just figured that out. “After everything. I just—picked a city and went. Made a friend. Got a job I actually like. Figured out where to get good coffee.” A small exhale. “Thought that counted as a life.”

“Yeah.”

“My whole life is supposed to be there.” She looks at the house. “Except Connor's here. And you're here. And Ethan and Liam are—” She stops. “I guess I built a whole life in the wrong city.”

I don't say anything.

“That's a terrifying thing to realize,” she says.

“Probably.”

She turns to look at me. “You're not going to argue with any of it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you already know,” I say. “Portland was somewhere to go. This is somewhere to stay.”

“Four people and a baby, Andrew. In a house. In Vegas. Connor barely—”

I think about how to say it. I'm not fast with words. I don't build arguments the way Ethan does, or talk my way through things the way Liam does. I just know what's in front of me.

“You weren't browsing a baby registry,” I say. “You were building a home. You just didn't have anywhere to put it yet.”

She turns back to the house.

I watch her and wait.

Then her hand moves to her stomach.

She does it without thinking now. Started maybe two weeks in—a reflex, like checking something she wants to keep close. I've watched it a hundred times. She never notices she's doing it.

Chapter forty-six

Chapter Forty-Six—Liam

Everybody's asleep, which means it's my shift.

Nobody assigned it. Nobody ever does. But somebody stays up and somebody keeps watch, and in this house that somebody has always been me. I just never told them that's what I'm doing. As far as the three of them know, I'm a guy who can't sleep in a new place. Which is also true. The two things live comfortably next to each other.

The new place still smells like paint and cardboard. Half our life is in boxes labeled in Ethan's block letters—KITCHEN, FRAGILE, RILEY OFFICE—and the other half is in boxes I labeled STUFF, which Ethan has already informed me twice is “not a system.” He's right. It's not. It's a guy who's moved enough times to know the label doesn't matter when you're the only one carrying the box.

Except I'm not, this time. That's the part I keep tripping over.

I do a lap of the house.

Not because anything's wrong. Because that's what the wiring does at two in the morning, and after enough years you stop fighting it. Front door, locked. Windows, latched. I clock the exits without meaning to, the same way I clock them in a restaurant, a lobby, a hotel across the street from a penthouse we just got thrown out of. Old habit. You learn early that the fastest way to not get hurt is to always know how to leave.

I've been very good at leaving. It's practically the family trade—except I don't have one of those, so call it the only thing I trained myself into instead.

I did two tours. I don't talk about them much, and not because they're some dark locked room. There's just nothing to say that doesn't come out sounding like a bumper sticker. You go. You count seconds until something goes sideways, and then you count them until it stops. And then you come home.

That's the part nobody warns you about, actually. Not the going. The coming home. Standing in the doorway of an apartment at three in the morning with your bag still on your shoulder, milk gone bad in the fridge because there was no one around to drink it, keeping watch over four hundred square feet of nothing because your body hasn't gotten the order to stand down. You get used to it. That's the real trick. You get so used to it you start to think it's a personality.

The bedroom door is open a few inches. I don't go in. I just stand where I can hear them.

Riley's on her side, the way she sleeps now, one hand tucked under the pillow and the other resting low on her stomach even in sleep. She started doing that a couple weeks in. A reflex. Andrew notices it too—I've caught him watching it with that look on his face like he's memorizing something. None of us says out loud that we've all gone a little stupid over a person currently the size of a lime.