Page 22 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

By the end of the second interview, he’s stopped trying altogether. Instead of sitting across the room, observing and testing in subtle ways, he’s taken up a position beside me, one hand resting against the arm of my chair as though anchoring himself there. His silence isn't passive; it’s a quiet withdrawal that tells me more than any answer he could’ve given.

He isn't a child who disengages easily. Curiosity has always come naturally to him, as has the instinct to connect, to understand, to find his place within a new dynamic. Watching that instinct recede, even temporarily, is enough to confirm what I already know.

None of these candidates are right.

When the door closes behind the final interview of the scheduled list, I allow myself a controlled exhale, leaning back slightly in my chair as the room settles into stillness once more.

“That’s enough for today,” I say.

Oliver shifts immediately, the tension leaving him in a way that suggests he’s been waiting for those words for some time. “Good.”

I glance at the stack of remaining files, untouched and increasingly irrelevant. “This shouldn't be this difficult.”

Oliver considers that, tilting his head slightly. “Maybe you don’t want one really.”

There's a flicker that might be close to amusement at that. “That’s entirely possible.”

I rest my forearms against the desk, my gaze lowering to the papers without really focusing on them. There was atime when these decisions wouldn't have required this level of deliberation, when it would’ve been shared, balanced between two perspectives rather than carried alone.

Megan never approached these things the way I do.

She relied on instinct where I rely on process, reading people in ways that often bypassed logic entirely. Where I assess qualifications and structure, she would observe the details others overlooked. The pauses, the inconsistencies, the things people revealed without meaning to. More often than not, she arrived at the right conclusion before I’d even finished evaluating the variables.

It made things easier.

I lean back further in the chair, my gaze shifting toward the window, though I'm not truly looking at the city beyond it.

“It was simpler before,” I say, the words measured, but no less true for it.

Oliver is quiet before responding. “Because of Mom?”

“Yes.”

The word settles between us with a quiet finality.

He accepts it without hesitation, because for him, the answer is straightforward. Megan isn't an absence in the abstract sense; she's still present in the small rituals that have carried forward, in the habits neither of us has chosen to break, in the way her name still exists comfortably in conversation.

For me, it's more complicated than that.

The official report was definitive.

Pilot error.

A conclusion delivered with certainty, supported by data that was meant to close the matter entirely.

I never accepted it.

Megan had flown in conditions most pilots would avoid entirely, had handled system failures and unpredictable variables with a level of precision that bordered on instinct. Shewasn't careless. She wasn't inattentive. And she didn't make the kind of mistake that report implied.

Even now, years later, the details refuse to settle into anything that feels complete.

There were inconsistencies. Small ones perhaps, but enough to raise questions that were never fully answered. Data that didn't align as cleanly as it should have. A sequence of events that, when examined closely, suggested something more than simple human error.

I pushed for answers in the beginning.

Harder than most thought reasonable.

It had taken time, and Oliver, to force me to step back from that pursuit, to accept what couldn't be changed, to redirect my attention to what remained.