Page 81 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

He was there in the beginning.

Before the tower, before the board, before the investors who now talk about Strong AeroTech as though it emerged fully formed from market demand and my apparently singular vision. He was there when the company still occupied two badly painted rooms and an overworked server rack. When the original stabilization framework existed mostly as stubbornness, impossible hours, and the kind of optimism that only appears when everyone involved is slightly too young to understand how much could go wrong.

He helped build the first version of what we became.

Brilliant architect. Unstable life choices. Intermittent judgment at best.

Despite that, we've always gotten along.

I type back without slowing entirely.

Ethan: You change girlfriends faster than I change legal teams

Ethan: Wasn’t there someone else six months ago

The reply arrives almost immediately.

Bee:There was

Bee:Then there wasn’t

Bee:It’s a dynamic process

Bee:Also that isn't a no

I shake my head, easing back into a jog.

There was a time I would have known every detail of his personal life by accident. New cities, new women, new interests, each one arriving with enough enthusiasm to make permanence unlikely. He moved through life the way some people flip radio stations.

He left Strong AeroTech not because of any real professional break between us, but because his private life had imploded in some way that made Chicago feel impossible to stay in. There had been drama, though I never pressed for the full shape of it. A relationship turned toxic, a need to disappear for a while, a belief that stepping away from the company before it became too large to leave would be simpler than watching it grow without him.

At the time, I understood.

Or thought I did.

I still do, mostly.

I also always assumed he’d circle back eventually, if not to stay then at least to reenter the orbit more consistently. He never quite did. Consulting here and there. Independent projects. Too many ideas and not enough patience for infrastructure. The same mind that had once built some of the most elegant early stabilization logic I’d ever seen, applied now to a dozen things at once because permanence bored him.

My phone vibrates again.

Bee:She’s into planes now because of me

Bee:Tragic but fixable

Bee:Tell me you’ll let me parade her through the ballroom and pretend I’m a visionary

I can hear his voice in the text. That same infuriating, easy irreverence that made long nights in the startup years bearable and board meetings with early investors borderline survivable.

I reply before overthinking it.

Ethan: Yes, you can bring her

There’s a pause this time.

Long enough that I assume he’s either occupied or, more likely, offended by the absence of dramatic resistance.

Then…