Page 130 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

Footsteps behind me. Liam drops onto the floor in the doorway and leans against the frame, looking up at me from the ground—which is absolutely the most chaotic way to exist in any space, and also completely him.

“You good?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“You doing the thing where you say yeah but mean something more complicated?”

I look down at him. “A little.”

He stretches his legs out. “Tell me the complicated thing.”

I lean against the opposite side of the frame. “I keep waiting to feel like I earned it.”

He’s quiet. That’s unusual enough that I pay attention.

“Does it feel real?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Does it feel good?”

I look at the half-painted room. The obscenely yellow wall. The crib that took Andrew three seconds to fix. “Yeah,” I say. “It does.”

“The earning thing catches up,” he says. “It always does.”

Andrew appears at the end of the hall a few minutes later. He looks at Liam on the floor and me in the doorway and doesn’t change expression—he just comes and leans against the wall beside me.

Ethan comes too, eventually. He closes the laptop first. I notice that.

The four of us in the doorway of the half-finished nursery. Liam starts humming something under his breath that I’m pretty sure is from a kids’ TV show. Andrew tells him to stop. He doesn’t stop. Ethan puts his hand over mine where it’s resting on my stomach and just keeps it there, not saying anything at all.

We stay like that until one of the boxes Liam stacked in the living room falls over.

“That’s on you,” Andrew says.

“That’s on gravity,” Liam says.

Ethan goes to fix it.

I don’t move from the doorway.

Chapter forty-eight

Chapter Forty-Eight—Riley

I've been smoothing my shirt for about ten minutes.

The table looks right. The food smells right. The house still has boxes in two corners and masking tape on the trim by the kitchen window that Ethan keeps saying he'll remove and then doesn't, because he's been putting up shelves instead.

None of that matters. What matters is that Connor is going to walk through that door any minute, and I have no idea which version of him is coming.

“I could answer shirtless,” Liam says, appearing behind me. “Strategic distraction. Very committed to the cause.”

“No.”

“It's a great opener. Sets a tone.”

“What tone?”