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“Have you told Slate?” Weston asks.

“No.”

“He needs to know.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“When?”

I don’t answer because when I think about calling my agent and telling him about this… yeah. It’s not going to go well.

Doug, who’s been uncharacteristically quiet, clears his throat. “Can I just say one thing?”

Everyone looks at him.

“My cousin dated a girl for three weeks, moved her in, and she cleaned out his apartment while he was at his mom’s birthday party. Took the TV, the couch, his dog. The fucking dog, man.”

“That’s . . . not helpful, Doug.”

“I’m just saying. People aren’t always what they seem.”

Tate nods, not at Doug specifically, but at the general point. “Nobody’s calling this woman a con artist. We’re saying you don’t have enough information yet to be sure she isn’t one. A week isn’t enough time to know someone. It’s enough time to like someone. Those are different things.”

The words hit harder than anything else that’s been said. Because he’s drawing a clean, precise line between what I feel and what I know, and when I look at it honestly—really honestly—the feel column is overflowing and the know column is thin.

I know she cried in my shower that first night and thought I couldn’t hear. I know she tried to pay me back with eggs. I know she fights me on every dollar because depending on someone makes her feel like she’s failing. I know she could have left Ella at a fire station and walked away, and she didn’t.

But Tate’s right. I don’t know her middle name. I don’t know where she grew up. I don’t know what she was like before the accident, before the grief, before everything fell apart. I’ve seen who she is under pressure, and it’s impressive, but I haven’t seen who she is when things are normal. I don’t even know what normal looks like for her.

“I hear you,” I say, and I mean it this time. “All of you.”

“That’s all we’re asking,” Briggs says. “Just be smart.”

I pick up Ella’s carrier and the diaper bag. She hasn’t stirred through any of it—sleeping with her fist curled against her cheek, her mouth still working around the pacifier. Peaceful. Oblivious to a room full of men questioning whether the woman who feeds her and sings to her and holds her at 2 a.m. is someone who can be trusted.

“See you Thursday,” I say.

The hallway is long and bright and quiet. I push through the doors into the parking garage, and the cold air hits me, and the mood I drove in with is completely gone.

I strap Ella into the back seat. Close the door gently. Sit behind the wheel.

Don’t start the car.

My hands find the steering wheel and just grip. The garage is concrete gray and cold, and the only sound is Ella’s soft breathing from the back seat.

If one of them came to me with this story—met a girl, she moved in with me, there’s a baby—I’d have said everything they just said. Every word. Slow down. Be careful. You don’t know enough yet.

But they don’t know Ryleigh. They don’t know the way she presses her face into Ella’s hair when she thinks nobody’s watching. They don’t know how hard she works, or how much she cares.

That’s not a game. You can’t fake that kind of stuff.

Can you?

The doubt doesn’t crash in. It creeps. Through the cracks, the edges, the spaces between what I feel and what I can prove. What if I’m wrong? What if the tenderness and the chemistry are fogging something I should see clearly? What if Tate can see it from the outside because he’s not standing in the middle of it the way I am?

Seven days isn’t enough to know someone. Tate’s right about that.

But it’s enough to know that I want to.