Page 206 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

I don’t really rememberthe drive home.

There are fragments. Headlights cutting across wet pavement. The city blurring behind glass. My hand gripping the steering wheel too tightly. My phone lighting up in the console again and again until I turned it face down because if I looked at one more message, I might drive straight through the next red light.

Addy is pregnant.

The thought lands, again and again, with no reduction in force.

A child.

My child.

The realization fractures through me so violently I can barely hold onto a coherent thought. Not just a baby. A future, a responsibility, a line dividing my life into before and after.

By the time I reach the penthouse, my chest feels too tight for my ribs. I park, sit in the silence for several seconds, and force myself to breathe the way I learned to breathe in a cockpit.

Inhale. Hold. Assess.

Exhale. Correct.

Again.

It doesn’t work.

The elevator ride is worse. Too quiet. Too still. Every mirrored surface throws my own face back at me, pale and severe in a half-undone tuxedo, eyes too sharp, mouth too flat.

I’m a man arriving at the scene of something irreversible.

When the doors open, Diane is waiting just inside the penthouse entry with Oliver asleep against her shoulder, one of his arms hanging limp down her back. He’s too big for her to hold comfortably, but she’s managing it with the determined tenderness of a woman who inserts herself into everyone’s life and somehow becomes necessary.

“He woke up once,” she whispers. “Asked for you, so I brought him up here to sleep.”

Guilt strikes clean and deep. “I’m sorry.”

She studies me. Diane Carter misses very little, which is one of her most aggravating and occasionally useful qualities. Her gaze moves over my face, my open collar, the absence of Addy. “Is she all right?”

“She’s fine,” I say.

It’s the only word I can trust.

I take my son from her carefully. Oliver stirs against me, warm and heavy and smelling faintly of sleep, crayons, and the strawberry shampoo Addy uses on him because he insists it makes him “faster.”

“Daddy?” he mumbles.

“I’m here.”

Diane’s hand comes to my arm briefly. “Call if you need anything. Anything at all.”

“Thank you.”

She leaves quietly, for once without commentary, and that tells me more than words would have.

I carry Oliver inside. Captain follows at my heels, whining softly, his usual drama subdued by the tension in the apartment.The dog knows something is wrong. Of course he does. He has the emotional intelligence of half my board and better loyalty than most of them.

In Oliver’s room, I set him on the bed and remove his shoes. He watches me through sleepy eyes, clutching the blanket Addy folded for him this morning.

“Where is Addy?”

The question nearly takes me apart. “She’s out tonight. But she’ll be back soon.”