Page 6 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

Asher found out. Ended the engagement the same week. Didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t make it dramatic. Just quietly returned the ring and went back to work, which was somehow worse than if he’d put his fist through a wall.

He’s slept with her since. I’m almost certain of it, because Asher has the self-preservation instincts of a man who genuinely believes people deserve second chances and third chances and however many chances they need, which is a beautiful quality in a chef and a devastating quality in a man who keeps falling back toward the same person. Monica is Asher’s kryptonite and there is nothing Killian or I have been able to say about it that he hasn’t already said to himself.

Vivian laughs again. Asher smiles, real this time, the one that reaches his eyes.

Good. Stay there. Don’t check your phone.

I pick mine back up.

Camille has sent a follow-up.

I’m mid-response when my phone buzzes with something else and I glance down out of habit. Rachel. The preview shows enough that I know it’s a photo. Rachel is one of the crew assigned to this flight and she has a very reliable understanding of what I do and don’t want from any given trip, which is why I’ve requested her specific availability three times in the last year. No complications. No conversations about where this is going. Just two adults who enjoy each other’s company at thirty thousand feet and land cleanly on the other side.

She’d reached out last week when she saw my name on the manifest. I’d told her I was traveling with family. She’d said that was fine.

I appreciate a woman who understands context.

I pull up the photo, take in the details, and I’m about to type something appropriately appreciative when my phone rings.

Killian’s name on the screen.

I answer laughing because of course I do. “Checking in on us before the party’s even together, Kill?”

“Just making sure you’re not fucking around when you’re supposed to be being a father figure.”

“To be fair,” I say, leaning back in the chair, “we both know I’d pick up the phone even if I was fucking around. That’s called multitasking.”

“Maddox.”

“I need you to bring yourself down to about a forty percent right now. You know Ash and I are helicopter uncles. We’ve had this handled since 2000 and however many years it’s been.”

There’s a pause that means he’s deciding whether to push back on that or let it go. Killian has two modes: controlled and about to be controlled. The pause means we’re safely in the second one.

“Sophia texted?” he asks.

“Not yet. She’ll—” My phone buzzes in my hand. I pull it back and check. “Actually. Right on time. Soph just pulled up.”

“Text me when she’s through the door.”

“I’ll have her send you a photo with today’s newspaper once she walks in. You know, to prove she’s alive and unharmed and in our custody.”

He makes a sound that is not quite a laugh and hangs up.

I set the phone down and look toward the entrance.

This is the part I actually like. Sophia Thorne walking into a room is a specific experience. She inherited exactly zero of her father’s restraint and every single bit of his presence, and she deploys both without any apparent awareness of the effect. She’ll walk through a door talking mid-sentence to whoever’s with her and immediately fill whatever space she’s entered like she’s already claimed it on the way in.

She’s been doing it since she was eight years old and decided that Asher’s kitchen was technically her jurisdiction. I’d had to explain to Killian, very seriously, that the real authority structure in that house had shifted and he needed to adjust his expectations accordingly. He had not found this funny. Asher and I had found it extremely funny.

Being a godfather was not something I’d agreed to easily. Killian had actually had to make a case for it. I’d told him I wasn’t a kids person, that I wasn’t wired for that kind of responsibility, that he should find someone more suited to the permanence of the thing. He’d looked at me for a long moment and said you’re already there every other weekend and you brought her a stuffed penguin from Buenos Aires last month without anyone asking you to, so I’m not sure what you think you’re opting out of.

He’d had a point.

What I hadn’t expected was how much easier it would be than I’d feared. Because the thing about being a godfather is that the weight of it isn’t in the legal definition. It’s in the Tuesday night phone calls when she was sixteen and couldn’t talk to her dad about something. It’s in driving her to look at colleges even though Killian had offered a car service, because she’d asked me specifically. It’s in the fact that she’s twenty-five now with her own boutique and her own life and she still texts me when something is wrong before she texts almost anyone else.

Asher is the one in Killian’s will. If anything ever happened to Killian and Evelyn, Asher is the named guardian. Which is the right call. Asher is the stable one. Asher is the one who would actually know what to do with a child in a practical, daily sense.

I am the fun one. Always have been. I made my peace with that assignment a long time ago and I stand by it.