Page 126 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“You told her?!”

“Sophia’s not a redirectable person⁠—”

“I have been running alternate opening lines in my head every day for months. I’ve been dreading that conversation. And she already knows, and she’s been grinning at me like a Cheshire cat the entire time, and I thought she was just being Sophia and she was being Sophia with advance information!”

“Sophia with advance information is just Sophia turned up,” Maddox offers.

Harper puts both hands over her face and breathes out slowly into her palms and then drops them and looks at her stomach and says, “Your family is completely insane, little one. You’re going to fit right in.”

Killian’s hand tightens on her ankle. Maddox is already smiling. I press my mouth to the top of her head and leave it there, because some moments don’t need anything added to them.

47

HARPER

Ihear Sophia before I’m through the boutique door, which is how I usually find her when something isn’t going the way she wants it to.

“Enzo, I need it two inches to the left, not a centimeter, not an inch and a half, two full inches.”

“This is two inches.”

“That is not two inches. I’m talking real measurements not male meteorologist inches.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“Six inches of snow when the actual measurement is one? It’s aspirational, not actual.”

“Sophia, I have a measuring tape right here⁠—”

“Then use it!”

I slip past both of them with the takeout bag from Asher’s restaurant, giving Enzo a sympathetic look that he returns with his eyes, because his hands are occupied holding what appears to be a velvet display fixture that Sophia is eyeing with the focused displeasure of a woman who is personally offended by its placement. She turns when she hears me and her expression does a full reset, sharp to warm, in about half a second.

“Harps.”

“Harps,” I agree, holding up the bag. “Asher’s. I called in an order.”

She abandons the display situation without a backward glance, which Enzo seems to find both a relief and slightly insulting, and follows me through to her office in the stockroom, which she’s made into something between a workspace and a very chic nest, fabric swatches on one wall, her P&L pinned beside a calendar she actually uses, a tiny lamp that makes everything look like it’s lit by candlelight.

We eat for a few minutes without talking, which is something Sophia and I have always been good at, the comfortable silence version of being in the same room, and I’m grateful for it because I’ve been rehearsing this conversation in my head for two months and none of the versions I practiced start the way I need them to. I’ve run it as a serious conversation, as a funny one, as a casual thing I slide in between bites of a sandwich. None of them have sounded like me. All of them have ended with Sophia’s face doing something I couldn’t predict and me not knowing what to do with whatever came next.

The sandwich is good. The lamp is warm. Sophia’s eating with the focused efficiency she brings to everything she genuinely enjoys, which means she’s comfortable, which means this is as good a moment as I’m going to get.

“So,” I say finally, setting down my fork. “You know how I’ve been seeing Killian, Maddox, and Asher?”

Sophia puts her sandwich down, presses both hands flat on the desk, and looks at me with the expression of someone exercising restraint so physically aggressive it’s almost visible.

“Oh, you mean how you’ve been fucking them and you’re pregnant now?”

I immediately bury my face in my hands.

She starts laughing, full and bright and completely uncontrolled, the laugh she only does when something has genuinely got her, and I hear her chair push back and then her hands are pulling mine away from my face and she’s looking at me with tears of amusement running down her face.

“How,” she says, “are you this shy? After the summer of all summers? Courtesy of my family tree?”

“Stop taking it so well,” I tell her, which makes her laugh harder.

“I think you’re the one who took it well, bestie. And then some.”