Page 239 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

Sophie and Luci look at me.

Oliver raises his hand. “I want cocoa.”

“Thank you for changing the subject,” I tell him.

Sophie brings cocoa for Oliver, tea for me, coffee for Luci, and a muffin “for the table,” which Luci immediately claims half of because apparently pregnancy support burns calories.

For a while, it’s easy.

Oliver plays in the corner.

Sophie tells us about a customer who tried to pay with a gift card from a completely different coffee chain and then argued that “coffee is coffee.”

Luci declares she hates Chicago wind but respects its commitment.

I laugh.

Then I press my lips to Oliver’s hair and stare out the window at the city Bryce dragged me to, Ethan made complicated, and three tiny heartbeats may tie me to forever.

I don’t know what I’m going to do.

I only know I’m tired of running.

And terrified that staying might hurt even worse.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Ethan

By mid-afternoon,I've stopped pretending this is only about the gala.

The corrupted demo code is open across three monitors in the secure analysis room, stripped down to its core architecture. Jeffrey stands beside the main console, arms folded, expression grim. Sara is on the other side of the glass with legal, which is where I asked her to stay until we had something useful enough to say out loud.

The room is cold. Servers prefer it that way, and I’ve always found the environment clarifying. No excess or softness. Just data, trace logs, architecture maps, and the quiet hum of machinery doing exactly what it has been instructed to do.

That, of course, is the problem.

Systems don't fail emotionally.

People do.

“Run it again,” I say.

Jeffrey doesn’t move. “We’ve run it six times.”

“Then the seventh should be efficient.”

He gives me a look. “That sounded like a threat.”

“It was a request.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

I don’t answer.

He runs it again.

The structural comparison populates slowly, current demo corruption on the left, recovered stabilization framework from Megan’s aircraft on the right. Two different generations of technology. Two different platforms. Two different failures.