“Very funny.” I kiss her shoulder. “Go back to sleep, minha linda.”
She’s out within seconds, but I stay awake for another hour, my hand on her twenty-four-week belly, feeling our daughter move. Every kick, every flutter, every shift feels like a miracle.
This is my daughter. My family. Real in a way she hadn’t been before, even with the ultrasounds and the heartbeat monitors.
The following Tuesday, I show up at Jasmine’s apartment with takeout and find her crying at her desk. The climax isn’t working, she says. Celeste is being stubborn again.
I sit on her couch and eat lo mein while she talks through the problem out loud while pacing her small living room. Somewhere around the third container of dumplings, she stops mid-sentence.
“The betrayal comes from within,” she says. “Not from Qalingo. From Celeste herself. She must be the one who almost destroys everything.”
Jasmine is back at her laptop before I can respond. I finish dinner alone, clean up her kitchen, and send her a text on my way out.
Proud of you. Call me tomorrow.
She calls the next day and proposes restructuring her writing schedule to mirror my work hours. No more late-night writingbinges that leave her exhausted when I’m free. No more missed dinners because she’s lost in a scene.
When I work, she writes. When I am done, she is done.
“That way,” she said, “our time together is actually together. No laptops. No work calls. Just us.”
It was such a simple solution. And it changed everything.
Small victories. But they added up.
In the weeks that followed, I stopped comparing myself to my father every time I made a promise, and stopped waiting for the inevitable failure that never came.
Jasmine started calling me when she needed something instead of trying to handle it alone. She stopped triple-checking my certainty every time I made a plan for our future. We were building a door together, just like Celeste and Qalingo were in her book.
But ordinary life doesn’t pause for personal growth. The week Jasmine hits twenty-six weeks, everything at work goes sideways.
A bad update bricks sixty thousand devices overnight. I spend eighteen hours on calls with engineers, walking back code, deploying patches, and watching recovery numbers tick up one agonizing percent at a time. By the time the last device comes back online, I’ve aged approximately forty years.
Empty coffee cups litter my desk, and my laptop surrounded by scattered notes. The city beyond my windows shifts from afternoon gold to the orange of approaching dusk. I’ve watched the sun rise and now threaten to set again from this same chair.
The door to my office swings open without a knock. Kamal strolls in with a paper bag from the bakery downtown in one hand and two coffees balanced in the other. Jaxon follows, already loosening his tie.
“Bruh.” Kamal stops in the doorway, taking in the sight of me. “Please tell me you ain’t still wearing yesterday’s clothes.”
“What else would I be wearing? Swim trunks?”
“All devices are back online.” Jaxon drops onto the leather couch against the wall, stretching his legs out. He looks as tired as I feel. “Could’ve been worse. PR starts damage control tomorrow, but we contained it.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that sixty thousand users couldn’t access their devices for almost twelve hours because I pushed a bad update.”
“We pushed a bad update.” Jaxon loosens his tie further. “All three of us signed off on that timeline. This isn’t just on you.”
I lean back in my chair. “Yeah, well, I’m the one who wrote the code.”
“And we’re the ones who said ship it.” Kamal sets the coffees on my desk, then drops into the chair across from me. “Stop with the martyr act. It don’t suit you.”
“Everything suits me. I’m extremely attractive.”
“Did you sleep?” Jaxon asks, ignoring this.
“I slept.”
Kamal’s head tilts. “When?”
