Page 38 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

The box is at the bottom, half-covered by a piece of torn cardboard. Small. White. Packaging that's clinical.

Pregnancy test.

I hold it.

One of those moments where your brain needs to catch up to what your hands already know.

It explains everything. The water. The untouched food. The not feeling well. She’s been covering and working overtime to keep the performance running.

The fact that she’s been carrying this alone lands first. Not the rest of it—just that. We could have been taking care of her.

I've spent weeks telling myself the rooftop was one night we all agreed to leave alone. I've been very convincing about it. It's a skill.

But I'm standing in a trash room holding a pregnancy test and I can't find the joke.

That's how I know.

I stop myself.

I know how it feels when the person running point misses the thing that matters. I know it exactly.

Then the rest of it hits.

Three men.

Could be mine.

The thought lands heavier than it should.

Or exactly as heavy as it should.

I set the box down on the counter.

Look at it.

Pick it up again.

I was there. Six weeks ago—the rooftop, the champagne, the night that got filed under mistake in the group consensus and under something else entirely in my actual chest. I was there. Ethan was there. Andrew was there. And none of us have talked about it since, which felt like the right call at the time.

Doesn't anymore.

I place the cardboard back on top, exactly how it was. Retie the bag. Same knot.

I stand there with the recycling at my feet and the silence of a penthouse where no one knows what I just found.

I could walk down the hall right now. Knock on her door. Tell her I know and ask her to talk to me, because that's what I do—I make it easy, I keep things light, I've spent years being the person in the room who doesn't make things worse. I'm good at it.

But she put that box under the cardboard for a reason.

She's not ready.

I pick up the bag and take it to the trash room and come back and stand in the kitchen for another minute, thinking about the look on her face forty minutes ago when I told her she looked good. The half-second before the armor came back up. Under it—fear.

Not annoyance.

I pull out my phone.

I type it three times before I send it.