“I was.”
“So you know Elliot.”
Reed’s eyebrows shot up. He glanced sideways at Hudson.
“She knows,” Hudson said. “Just roll with it.”
Reed recalibrated quickly. Then he picked up his beer and took a long sip. "Okay. What do you want to know?"
"Everything."
"Jesus—" Hudson started.
"What’s Elliot like?"
Reed considered this with genuine seriousness. "Terrifying. Competent. Completely unable to keep a straight face around Hudson though."
"Interesting…" Taylor said. "And what’s Hudson like in the field?"
"Also terrifying. Less competent?—"
"Excuse me?—"
"—but better at making people like him." Reed set his beer down. "They were obsessed with each other from day one. Everyone at Selection knew it before either of them did."
Hudson snorted. As if.
"Aw," Taylor said. “That's genuinely sweet."
"It's not sweet, it's—" Hudson picked up his beer. "Can we talk about something else?"
"No," Taylor and Reed said simultaneously.
Reed looked at her. She looked at him. They appeared to reach some kind of understanding that Hudson found deeply alarming.
“How’s the baby?” Hudson said loudly.
That seemed to work. Reed’s entire face lit up. “She’s—” He pulled out his phone. “Wanna see? Just turned twelve weeks.”
“You mean three months,” Hudson said.
“Twelve weeks.”
Hudson shot Taylor a look. Taylor shrugged and leaned in to whisper: “Parents count in weeks, dummy.”
“For how long? A hundred and four weeks?” Hudson whispered back.
“I can hear you both,” Reed said, already pulling up the photos.
He turned the phone around. Mae was asleep in a striped onesie and a very small hat, mouth open, fists curled up by her face.
“Oh my god,” Taylor said. “She’s so tiny.”
“She’s gotten big actually. You should have seen her at two weeks.”
Hudson studied the photo. Mae was approximately the size of his forearm. “She looks like a potato.”
“She does not. She looks like Sarah,” Reed said firmly, taking his phone back.
