Page 35 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

Connor is still in the Maldives but comes home soon. He gave up his twenties raising me after the accident. Sixteen years old and suddenly the only family I had left, and he never once made it feel like a burden. He sold his motorcycle, took the night shift so he could be home during the day, learned how to make grocery lists and parent-teacher conferences and how to talk a panicked kid through nightmares that weren’t nightmares at all.

He asked me for one simple thing—smile at some dinners, don’t make it complicated. I have made it spectacularly complicated.

I’ve been trying my whole adult life to not be a burden anymore. Now I’m standing in his penthouse with three of his business partners’ baby growing inside me and no idea how to tell the one person who’s never let me down that I’ve managed to complicate everything. The investor meeting is in four days. I have a client deadline on Thursday and a phone call with my Portland landlord I've been putting off for two weeks because I don't know what to tell him. My apartment has art on the walls—actual frames, not tape, hung the year I finally stopped pretending it was temporary. My clients know my name. I have a coffee shop where they start my order when they see me come through the door even though they get it slightly wrong. Five years of calling something mine without being entirely sure I meant to stay. I don’t know what to do with that now.

My phone is still in my hand. I open the thread to Jules before I can talk myself out of it.

Me: You up? Jules: Always. What’s wrong?

I stare at the screen. My thumbs hover.

Me: I’m pregnant.

The three dots appear, disappear, appear again.

Jules: Holy shit. Whose?

Me: …all three of them. Long story.

Jules: Riley.

Me: I know.

Jules: You okay?

Me: No. Connor gets back in two weeks.

I don’t add the rest. I don’t have to. Jules was the one who helped me pack the two suitcases I took to Portland. She knows exactly what it would mean if I blew up the one stable thing left in my life.

Her reply comes fast.

Jules: Breathe. Whatever you decide, I’ve got your back. But you have to tell him. You can’t carry this alone.

I close the thread without answering.

She’s right.

I just don’t know how.

I pick the test up and put it in my pocket.

I stand up. Check my face in the mirror—same face, inexplicably. I splash water on it, cold, and watch it run off.

Then I unlock the door.

Ethan is right there.

He's leaning against the wall opposite, arms crossed loosely. The posture of someone who's been there a while. Jacket on. He looks like someone who had somewhere to be and made a different decision.

“You okay?” he says.

He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. Doesn’t say I was worried. The Ethan version, which lands harder than concern would. His eyes behind his glasses are doing the thing they do: not moving, not rushing, taking in information and declining to share what he's done with it.

“I’m fine,” I say.

I am acutely, physically aware of the test in my pocket.

“You've been in there a while.”