Page 216 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

Mara continues the scan, capturing images, measuring tiny impossible shapes. I can’t make sense of most of it, but I can’t look away either.

Three.

Three tiny beginnings.

Three little flickers.

Three reasons my life will never be the same.

Beneath the terror, something else rises, fragile and warm.

Wonder.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Ethan

I should’ve goneto the hospital.

That’s the first coherent thought I have when morning becomes harsher than dawn, and the city outside my windows brightens into a pale, indifferent gray.

I should’ve gone.

Instead, I’m in my home office with two cold cups of coffee, an untouched plate of toast Diane left “for my nerves,” and three monitors filled with code that no longer appears to be a malfunction.

It’s intent.

Oliver is in the living room with Captain. I can hear him sometimes through the half-open office door, his small voice rising and falling as he explains to the dog that airplanes don’t sleep in garages, they sleep in hangars, and Captain cannot be trusted with landing gear because he has “mouth crimes.”

Normally, that would make me smile.

This morning, it lands somewhere behind the glass wall I seem to be standing behind.

My phone is on silent beside my keyboard.

Face down.

A terrible decision made for practical reasons.

I text Addy first thing. Not enough. Not nearly enough, but something. Then Jeffrey called again, Sara after him, then the demo lead, then legal, and the morning fractured into urgency before I could catch up to my own life.

I told myself I would check my phone again in five minutes.

That was two hours ago.

On the center monitor, Bryce’s patch sits in a quarantined sandbox, mapped against the original corrupted demo sequence. On the left, Jeffrey’s anomaly report. On the right, a memory allocation trace that shouldn’t exist unless someone knew exactly where to hide what they didn’t want found.

A backdoor.

I don’t want the word to be true.

I’m staring directly at its architecture, and I still don’t want it.

Because sabotage is one thing.

Sabotage can be external. Anonymous, competitive, ugly, but clean in the way corporate threat models are clean. You identify the breach, contain it, prosecute it, improve the system, and move forward.

This is different.