Page 162 of Secret Heir For The Billionaire Twin

I open the door and find Maya standing on the porch with two iced coffees in one hand and her sunglasses pushed onto the top of her head.

“I brought caffeine,” Maya says.

“Which means I’m either a very good friend or avoiding my own house.”

I step aside to let her in.

“With twins, those can be the same thing.”

Maya laughs as she walks inside.

“Tom has them at soccer practice. They were arguing in the car about who got the green water bottle, and I decided my marriage would survive better if I disappeared for forty-five minutes.”

Theo appears at the edge of the kitchen.

“Aunt Maya.”

“There’s my favorite engineer,” Maya says, setting the coffees down.

Theo frowns. “I’m not an engineer.”

“Not yet.”

He considers that for a second, then points toward the dining table.

“My pulley works now.”

Maya glances at me. “Should I ask?”

“No,” I tell her.

Theo ignores me. “The string was wrong.”

Maya nods solemnly. “Tragic.”

“I fixed it.”

“I had every confidence in you,” Maya says.

Theo seems satisfied with that and heads back to his homework. I hand Maya one of the stools at the kitchen island, then take the coffee she brought me.

“You really came all the way over here because of a water-bottle argument?”

“That and because I needed to complain about work to someone who understands why adults with expensive degrees still refuse to read an email before replying to it.”

“Ah. There it is.”

Maya takes a long sip of her coffee.

“One of my editors sent a pitch deck back this afternoon because she thought the headline was too aggressive. It was the same headline she approved yesterday.”

“Maybe she experienced personal growth overnight.”

“She experienced selective amnesia.”

I laugh.

Maya has been in California long enough that I sometimes forget there was ever a version of my life here without her. She and Tom moved west less than two years after I did when Maya took a senior editorial role with her publication’s Los Angeles bureau. What started as a career move became permanent somewhere between the twins starting preschool, Tom changing firms, and Maya deciding she preferred complaining about traffic to complaining about winter.