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“Just Luca,” I say, the words coming out just slightly exasperated yet fond without being too enthusiastic, the tone of someone discussing a friend who is lovable but occasionally ridiculous. “We are having a girls’ night tonight. If that’s okay?”

Daniel nods, his face relaxing into a smile that looks almost genuine. “Sure,” he says. “I’ve got that thing with the Henderson account anyway. I’ll probably be late.”

Something in my chest tightens, a familiar feeling that I now recognize as the gap between what he’s saying and what he means.

“Okay,” I say, turning back to the dishes. “Drive safe.”

He says “love you” from the hallway. I answer automatically.

The living room looks the way it only ever does when I stop trying to make the house look like a magazine: containers spread across the coffee table, three wine glasses half-filled with various shades of red, baby toys scattered across every surface, the overhead light off and two floor lamps on instead, casting everything in warm amber. I’ve cleared enough space on the couch for actual humans to sit, but the armchair is still covered with the clean laundry I folded four hours ago and haven’t had a chance to put away. Milo’s favourite giraffe, Gerald, because alliteration is apparently non-negotiable for baby toys, has somehow ended up on the bookshelf, balanced precariously on a copy of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” that I stopped reading at chapter three because it made me want to throw things.

On the large padded play mat in the centre of the room, the twins are in their natural states of being: Maisie on her back, watching the ceiling, and Milo already attempting to roll himself somewhere he shouldn’t be. His chubby legs kick with determined enthusiasm as he rocks from side to side, his tiny face scrunched with concentration as he works his way toward the edge of the mat and certain disaster.

“No, no, no,” I tell him, gently redirecting him toward the centre. “We’ve discussed this. The floor is lava and also very hard.”

He responds with a sound that might be agreement or might be a declaration of war, it’s genuinely difficult to tell with Milo, and immediately begins rocking in the opposite direction, his trajectory now aimed directly at a particularly sharp corner of the coffee table.

The doorbell rings, and I scoop him up with one hand, balancing him on my hip as I head for the door. “Your uncle Luca has arrived, which means things are about to get significantly more dramatic. Brace yourself.”

I’m right. Luca arrives with the energy of a category-five hurricane that’s just discovered espresso, carrying three bags of groceries and a bottle of what appears to be extremely expensive tequila. He takes one look at my face and stops dead in the doorway, his expression shifting from excitement to concern in the space of a single heartbeat.

“Right,” he says, setting the bags down with a decisive movement. “I’m making you a proper drink and you’re going to sit down and let me be dramatic on your behalf.”

“I’m fine,” I start, but he cuts me off with a look so withering it could kill plants at twenty paces.

“You are many admirable things, Els,” he says, steering me toward the couch with one hand while unpacking the grocery bags with the other. “A gifted barista, an excellent mother, surprisingly good at parallel parking for someone who learned to drive in a town with three traffic lights. But you are not fine, and also you are a terrible liar, which is actually refreshing in a world full of people who lie easier than they breathe.”

Before I can argue, the doorbell rings again, a shorter, quicker sound that can only be Harper. I transfer Milo to Luca’s waiting arms. “I’ve got him,” he says, sniffing the air. “Go. She brought the good garlic bread, I can smell it.”

Harper stands on the porch with Leo balanced on one hip and a bottle of wine in her free hand, her hair pulled into a messy bun that somehow looks both accidental and deliberately stylish. “Hey,” she says, her voice warm. “Sorry we’re late. Someone decided that right before we left was the perfect time to explain the entire plot of Jurassic Park to his stuffed triceratops.”

Leo looks up at the sound of his name, his face lighting with the particular joy he reserves for people he especially likes. “Auntie Els!” he says, already wriggling to be put down. “I drew you a picture of a dinosaur with a jetpack!”

“It’s currently drying on my kitchen counter,” Harper says, handing me the wine and moving Leo to the ground. “Along with approximately seventeen explanations of why dinosaurs with jetpacks are both historically inaccurate and extremely cool.”

Leo doesn’t wait for the adults to finish talking, he’s already charging into the living room with the determination of a six-year-old on a mission. By the time Harper and I make it back, he’s dropped to his knees on the play mat and begun a very serious campaign to make Milo laugh, his tiny face set in an expression of such intense concentration it’s almost comical.

“Watch this,” he announces to no one in particular. “I’m going to do the thing with the eyebrows.”

Harper sets the wine on the table and kisses my cheek, her hand briefly squeezing my shoulder. She doesn’t ask if I’m okay, or what’s wrong, or any of the other questions that would require an answer. She just starts helping clear space on the couch with the ease of someone who’s been in this house a hundred times, folding the blanket that’s been draped across the armrest and moving Maisie’s abandoned teething ring to the coffee table.

“So,” she says, reaching for the corkscrew, “Luca mentioned something about a customer and a spiritually incorrect flat white?”

The conversation flows easily from there, Luca recounting the full, dramatic story of the man who insisted his coffee was “vibrating at the wrong frequency” and demanded a refund plus “emotional damages,” Harper complaining about the manuscript she’s stuck on, “I can’t make the cheating feel earned, which means the forgiveness feels false, which means the entire emotional arc collapses like a soufflé in a wind tunnel”, and then, with perfect timing, Liv arrives.

She’s in her standard uniform, all black, from her boots to her oversized jumper to the beanie pulled low over her long hair, carrying a bottle of wine in one hand and her laptop bag in the other. She pauses in the doorway, takes in the scene with a single sweeping glance, and announces, “I almost stayed home because emotional vulnerability is against my personal beliefs.”

“Yet here you are,” Luca says, handing her a glass of wine without being asked. “The living embodiment of emotional growth.”

“Shut up,” Liv says, but there’s no heat in it. “I’m only here for the gossip and the garlic bread. And possibly to judge your life choices from a safe distance.”

“I’ve missed you too,” I tell her, accepting the hug she offers with rigid arms and averted eyes, the Liv Carter Special, affection disguised as obligation.

We settle into the comfortable rhythm that only happens when the four of us are together, our conversations overlapping, stories interrupting other stories, laughter rising and falling in waves across the room.

It’s warm and messy, this kind of normal that exists outside my marriage, outside the careful image I’ve been maintaining for weeks. For nearly an hour, I almost forget about the locked folder on my phone, about Clara’s careful voice explaining the difference between marital and separate property, about Daniel’s phone angled slightly away from me when a notification arrives.

Then Harper says, “Els?” and the room goes quiet.