Maceo's quiet for a moment. Then he says, "Then don't do it alone."
I don't remember deciding to close my eyes. One moment I'm counting breaths against Maceo's shoulder, and the next the contract folder's only a pale shape on the table, no longer bright enough to command me.
The last thing I register is Maceo’s hand shifting over mine, his fingers settling there without trying to loosen my grip. I have his wrist caught like I need proof he will stay, and if he notices the desperation in it, he does not name it. He only adjusts enough to take my weight more comfortably, his shoulder solid beneath my temple, his breathing steady where mine has finally stopped fighting him.
The contract folder stays on the table. My phone stays in the other room. The house moves quietly around us, distant enough that I can let it move without rising to meet every sound. Maceo remains awake beside me, still and warm in the dim library, and this time when sleep pulls me under, I let his hand be the last thing I hold.
15
Blake
The first alert hits before sunrise, while the house is still quiet enough that every vibration from my wrist monitor feels louder than it should.
I'm sitting in my office with the Starlight Falls III deployment dashboard open across one screen and the Ember House revision folder open on the other. The launch issue isn't catastrophic. I know that because the numbers tell me so. Regional latency spike. Migration failure affecting a small groupof early-access accounts. A shard that can be isolated, patched, and monitored before most players wake up and decide to make the internet everyone's problem. It's manageable, the kind of thing my team handles every time we ship anything this large. I know all of that, and still, my pulse jumps hard enough that Quentin's system sends me a warning before I've even finished reading the log.
I dismiss the notification and pull up the migration data.
The coffee beside my keyboard's gone cold. The toast Grayson left me hours ago is still on the plate, missing one bite from when he stood in the doorway and waited until I put something in my mouth before he'd leave. I told him I was going to finish one response and come upstairs. I meant it when I said it, but that was before the launch dashboard went red, before the legal team asked whether "independent but philosophically aligned" was too much connection between Ember House and Keller Industries, before Dorian's team uploaded another marketing packet with the kind of soft language that makes exploitation look tasteful if no one reads too closely.
If I fix the launch, the revenue projection holds. If the projection holds, Victor's got less leverage. If I rewrite the Ember House language myself, Dorian can't slide Luca's history into a donor deck and call it mission clarity. If I answer legal before Luther sees the packet, I can spare him one more reason to sound like he's swallowing glass every time someone says partnership. If I keep working, the day stays measurable. Inputs, outputs, fixes, approvals. Things with edges.
My wrist vibrates again.
I ignore it.
The patch takes longer than it should because my hands aren't as steady as I want them to be. Twice, I read the same block of code and have to start over because the logic keeps slipping out of focus. I blame the light. I blame the coffee. I blame thefact that one of the kids shoved a glitter sticker onto the bottom corner of my monitor yesterday and every time the screen changes, it catches the lamp and flashes purple at me like the world's least helpful status indicator. I don't blame my heart, because if I start doing that, I have to stop, and stopping isn't currently on the list.
The next file arrives with the subject line Updated Narrative Language for Sanctuary Alignment.
I shouldn't open it while my body feels like this.
I open it.
The first page loads slowly, because apparently even the universe wants to give me time to make a better choice. It's a muted gold title slide with a photograph of the Ember House garden taken from an angle I don't recognize. No residents. No faces. No visible violation. Just the garden, the front walk, the bench Luca likes because it catches the afternoon sun but keeps his back toward the wall. The caption beneath it reads: From Scars to Sanctuary: The Keller Family's Vision of Recovery.
My hands go cold.
For a few seconds, I only stare at the slide. The phrase is clean. That's the problem. It's polished enough to defend, soft enough for someone like Victor to call inspirational if challenged, and hollow enough to turn Luca's survival into something a room full of investors could nod over while pretending they're generous people. I close the packet, reopen it because I need the file path, and start drafting the rejection note in a separate window so I don't type the first version directly into the response field.
The first version isn't useful. The second's better. The third's the one I send, because it says no without giving anyone the satisfaction of saying I sounded unstable.
A small hand touches my knee.
My whole body jolts back from the desk. The chair wheels catch against the rug, and for one ugly second the office tiltshard enough that I have to grip the edge of the keyboard tray to stay upright. James stands beside me in faded pajama pants and one of Luca's oversized shirts, holding a plastic dinosaur with its leg turned backward. His gaze drops to my wrist monitor, then comes back to my face, careful in a way I hate seeing on him.
"Papa," he says, holding the dinosaur up instead of asking about the buzzing against my wrist, "he can't stand because his leg's wrong."
I pull in a breath through my nose and hold out my hand. "Let me see him."
James places the dinosaur in my palm. The joint's jammed at an angle, probably from Samuel trying to make it climb something it was never designed to survive. I work the plastic loose with my thumb, feeling the tremor in my own fingers and hoping James doesn't. He watches the repair like I'm doing something important, which makes the tightness in my chest move somewhere softer for half a second.
"There," I murmur when the leg clicks back into place. "Try him now."
James sets the dinosaur on the corner of my desk. It wobbles once, then stands. His expression relaxes as if I've personally prevented an extinction event, and I'd laugh if I had the air for it. Instead, I smooth a hand over his hair and look toward the doorway. "Where's Grayson?"
"In the kitchen. Samuel said pancakes taste better under your desk."
I close my eyes briefly because I already know what I'm going to see before I lean back and look down. Two socked feet are visible in the shadow beneath my desk. Samuel's wedged himself behind the side panel with a blanket, a stuffed rabbit, and a folded pancake on a napkin. I don't know how long he's been there. That lands worse than it should, not because Samuel's done anything wrong, but because an entire child got into myoffice, crawled under my desk, and settled in while I was staring at a screen ten inches from my face.
