Page 73 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

Just the beat that follows when someone finally names the thing already sitting in the room.

Liam looks at me. “You've been thinking about this since the beginning.”

“Since the morning after she told us.”

“You didn't say anything.”

“I needed to know you'd both show up first.”

Andrew sets down his mug. “We're here.”

“You are.”

That's all that needs to be said about that.

The food arrives. Liam eats. Andrew drinks coffee. I manage half of mine before my phone buzzes against the table, face-down. I flip it over. Work email, nothing urgent. I set it back.

“Harrington dinner is in two days,” I say.

Liam's expression holds but his eyes go flat. That's the tell with him. Just for a second.

“I know,” he says.

“We need to be steady in that room. All three of us.”

“We're always steady in that room.”

“This is the first time we're walking in carrying this. It changes what we’re holding in check while we’re in there.”

Andrew turns his coffee mug in a slow circle on the tablecloth.

“You think they'll notice something's off?”

“I think Harrington's people notice everything. So we make sure we give them nothing they can use against us.” I pull up my email. “His assistant sent a standard follow-up yesterday.”

I read it aloud.

Following up on the closing timeline. The group has a few questions about the current partnership structure and long-term stability.

I look up.

Liam reads the word stability the way he reads most things from Harrington's team. Like a man who's been in actual combat zones and has run entirely out of patience for boardroom games.

“Stability,” he says.

“That's the word they used.”

“We go in together,” I say. “We close the dinner. We walk out with the deal intact.”

“Fine,” Liam says.

Andrew nods once.

We eat. Or Liam eats, Andrew drinks coffee, and I rearrange food on my plate without making much progress.

Getting out of the penthouse only solved one problem. It got us somewhere loud enough to talk freely. It didn't fix the part where we still have to go back.

Riley is in the apartment right now. Or she's not. Maybe she's at the coffee shop two blocks over. Or walking somewhere with her headphones in. She's good at building small exits into her days. I've noticed how she does it, the quiet engineering of it. A reason to step out. A place to go. Just in case she needs to leave in a hurry.