Page 252 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

His bedroom door is open.

He isn’t in bed.

For one terrible second, every part of me stops. Then I hear him again from Addy’s room.

I push open her room door slowly, and the scene inside punches the breath from my lungs.

Oliver’s sitting on the floor beside Addy’s suitcase.

The suitcase sits open beside the bed, half-packed and unmistakably real.

Clothes folded inside. Toiletries on the bed. A cardigan draped over the side because she set it there and walked away before finishing. I guess before she went out with her sister.

Oliver clutches one of Addy’s sweaters to his chest.

His face is wet.

When he looks up at me, his chin trembles. “Is Sunshine leaving?”

I can handle almost anything. Board meetings with hostile men who want my chair. Emergency landings. Software failures. Federal investigators. Headlines. Stock plunges. Years of grief so heavy it changed the shape of my life.

But my five-year-old son sitting beside a half-packed suitcase, asking whether another woman he loves is leaving him?

No.

That I cannot handle.

I crouch in front of him. “Oliver.”

“She’s leaving.” His voice cracks. “She packed her clothes.”

I glance at the suitcase.

I knew Addy was scared. I knew she said she wanted to go back with Luci for a while. But some arrogant, stupid part of me didn’t believe she’d really do it. I told myself she wouldn’t really leave because the alternative felt unbearable to even consider.

So I filed it away as temporary panic. Hormones, exhaustion, fear. A conversation to revisit once the company stopped burning, once Bryce was contained, once I had enough information, enough control, enough of anything to offer her something that wasn’t wreckage.

I treated the woman carrying my children as a pending item, and now my son is crying beside her suitcase.

“She didn’t say goodbye,” Oliver whispers.

The words land exactly where they’re meant to. Because that’s what he remembers, even if he doesn’t have the language for it. People disappearing. A mother who went on a flight and never came home. Adults whispering, doors closing, griefentering a house before he was old enough to understand why the air had changed.

I sit on the floor with him. “Listen to me, Addy hasn’t left.”

“But she’s going to.”

I don’t answer fast enough.

His face crumples.

Damn it.

I pull him into my arms, and he comes willingly, sobbing against my chest.

“She likes it here,” he cries. “She likes Captain. And me. She said I’m her favorite tiny pilot.”

My eyes burn. “She does like it here.”