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He still doesn’t turn around. But I see something in his shoulders shift, almost imperceptibly, like the words landed somewhere even through the wall.

“I’ll go,” I say, eventually. Quiet. Defeated. “I’ll give you space.”

He doesn’t stop me. He doesn’t say anything at all.

I walk out of his room and down the stairs, past Cash and Wyatt and Beau, who are still standing in the kitchen doorway exactly where I left them. None of them say anything either, just watch me go with the specific helpless concern of people who know something terrible just happened and don’t have the first idea how to fix it. Beau takes half a step toward me, like he might say something, and then doesn’t, because there’s nothing to say that would actually help right now.

I get in my car. I sit there with the ultrasound photo still on the passenger seat, two small gray shapes staring up at me, and I put my head against the steering wheel, and I cry until there’s nothing left, alone for the second time today, except this time there’s no doctor with kind eyes to tell me none of this is my fault.

This part is my fault. I know that now.

I drive home slowly, my hands steady on the wheel even though nothing else about me feels steady at all, and I let myself think the thought I’ve been avoiding since I walked out of his room.

I might have just lost him.

I don’t know how to hold that thought next to the other one — the two flickers on the ultrasound screen, the due date that lines up exactly with the best weekend of my life, the fact that whatever happens between me and Theo now, these two small impossible facts are going to exist regardless. I’m going to be someone’s mother. I already am. And I did the hardest, most honest thing I’ve ever done today, and it still wasn’t enough to keep the wall from coming down.

I just didn’t know how much it was going to cost until right now.

Chapter 30

Theo

Idon’t move for a long time after she leaves.

I hear her go down the stairs. I hear the front door, the specific weight of it closing behind her, and then the house goes quiet in the way it does when everyone downstairs has decided, wordlessly, to give a room some space. I stand at the window with my arms crossed and I don’t feel anything yet. That’s the strange part. I know something enormous just happened — I know it the way you know a hit is coming a half-second before it lands — and my body hasn’t caught up to the size of it.

I sit down on the edge of my bed. The tablet’s still propped on my desk, the armor plating I was working on still half-finished, some fantasy warrior frozen mid-render like the world just paused itself in the middle of something that used to matter. I look at the screen for a while without touching it. The assignment’s due in three weeks. Three weeks used to be a real unit of time, something I could plan around, budget hours against. Right now it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing due-date-shaped means anything right now.

Twins.

I say the word out loud, quiet, testing the shape of it in an empty room. It doesn’t sound real. Nothing about the last twenty minutes sounds real — not the word, not her face when she said it, not the specific silence that followed where I couldn’t make myself say anything back.

I replay it. The six weeks. Charleston — no, not Charleston, she corrected herself on that, she didn’t know yet in Charleston, it was after, it was Conference Finals and Boston and my mother’s kitchen table where she already knew and let Mom ask if she was eating enough. I replay every single interaction from the last three weeks with the new information laid over it like a filter, and everything looks different in retrospect. The quiet at Raven House. The exhaustion she blamed on Nationals. The specific way she flinched at a smell during dinner two weeks ago and I asked if she was okay and she said fine, just tired, and I believed her because I wanted to believe her.

I noticed. I noticed the whole time and I let her manage it because I trusted her to bring it to me when she was ready, and the whole time she was ready, she’d been ready for weeks, she just decided I couldn’t handle it.

That’s the part that won’t stop circling.

Beau finds me a couple hours later.

He doesn’t knock first, not exactly — just pushes the door open slow enough that I hear it and have time to look up before he’s fully in the room. He doesn’t say anything right away. Just crosses to the bed and sits down beside me, the same unhurried presence he brings to everything, and for a long moment neither of us talks. Somewhere downstairs I hear Cash’s music, muted, respectful, the specific volume of someone who’s decided this isn’t the night for anything loud.

“You saw her,” I say, eventually. Not a question.

“I was standing right there when she walked in. All three of us were.” He shrugs, one-shouldered. “I saw her face before she even asked for you. And I put together the rest myself, watching you two go up those stairs and hearing that door shut. You want to tell me, or you want me to just sit here.”

I look at the tablet. At the half-finished armor plating. At anything that isn’t his face, because his face has the specific patient concern that always makes it harder to keep something contained.

“She’s pregnant,” I say. “Twins.”

Beau doesn’t react the way I expect. No shock, no sharp intake of breath — just a slow nod, like he’s absorbing it and tucking it somewhere it can actually be useful instead of just alarming.

“Okay,” he says. “How long has she known?”

“Six weeks.”

That gets a reaction. Small, but real — his jaw tightens, just slightly, and I watch him decide how to say the next thing carefully.