Page 83 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

He’s not wrong, exactly. There was a period when the gala was less an obligation and more proof that the thing we built had become real. Back when public presentation still carried the charge of ascent instead of the drag of expectation. Back when I wasn’t measuring every ballroom by how many times I’d once stood in one with Megan on my arm and thought, briefly, that a future could be stable simply because we wanted it to be.

I type back with the most practical version of the truth available.

Ethan: I love the company

Ethan: The gala is something else

The delay that follows tells me he understands more than he’s choosing to say.

Then:

Bee:Yeah

Bee:Fair enough

Bee:I’ll come up before then if schedules line up

Bee:You can throw impossible systems at me and I’ll insult your current team for sport

I actually smile at that.

Ethan: They’re not impossible systems

Ethan: And you’ll behave professionally in my office

Bee:Absolutely not

Bee:But I’ll try near the investors

That, at least, is the closest thing to a promise I’m likely to get.

I tuck the phone away and start running again, the path curving me back toward the open walk near the park’s center.

Bee coming to Chicago isn’t inherently significant. But it does trigger a familiar sequence of thought.

The old days.

Startup rooms and whiteboards covered in equations. Megan across the table disagreeing with him on interface assumptions. The three of us burning through coffee and deadlines and optimism with equal disregard for sleep. He was never the stable one. Never the one you trusted to remember a meeting time or answer an email before the third follow-up. But he was brilliant, and in those early years that had mattered more than polish.

He and Megan had always gotten along as well, though their styles couldn’t have been more different. She was exacting without being erratic, intuitive without abandoning discipline. He was all impulse, sparks, and architecture built from instinct. Between them, they made the earliest framework sharper than I could have managed alone.

The first stabilization model we designed together was inelegant by current standards.

It also worked.

Sometimes I miss that stage of the company. Not because it was easier, it wasn’t, but because the questions were cleanerthen. Survival. Innovation. Build or fail. No board or gala. No investors who wanted language packaged for sentiment before they’d agreed to fund function.

I finish the last mile harder than I started it, not from any disciplined training instinct but because the body occasionally benefits from blunt force effort when the mind refuses to settle.

By the time I slow outside the apartment building, I’ve stopped thinking about the almost kiss.

Not entirely.

That would be too convenient.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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