"Yeah." Devon looks at me steadily. "That's not what I asked."
He leaves me alone in the kitchen with wet hands and the distinct feeling of having been seen through a wall I thought was solid.
I find Kole on the back porch. He's leaning against the railing with a glass of wine, looking at the dark yard, and he looks up when the door opens and smiles. "Hey. Escaping the noise?"
"Needed a minute." I lean against the railing next to him. The air is cold and it feels good after the heat inside. "Your home is beautiful."
"It's a disaster." He laughs. "But thank you. It's ours, you know? Lawson wanted something bigger but I wanted something that felt lived in." He takes a sip of wine. "I spent years living in places that looked perfect and felt empty. I don't want that anymore."
The sentence lands on me harder than it should. I take a drink.
"Ray says you two are working on the Whitfield case together," Kole says. "That must be intense."
"It's a significant matter. We're managing."
He gives me a look that's amused and kind and entirely too knowing. "I used to talk like that. 'Managing.' 'Handling it.' Corporate omega survival language." He says it without judgment. "I worked in corporate before Noah. Different industry, same game. Keep your head down, outwork everyone, make sure nobody sees you sweat."
"It's effective."
"It's exhausting." He looks at his wine. "I was on suppressants for six years. Strongest dose they make. I figured if I couldn't be a 'real' omega — you know, the soft, domestic kind everyone expects — then I'd just... not be one at all. I'd be better. Harder. I'd make them forget my designation."
I'm staring at the yard and my throat is tight and I don't trust myself to speak because he's describing my life. He's describing my exact life and he doesn't know it.
"When everything happened with Lawson — the heat, the pregnancy, all of it — I thought my career was over. I thought mylife was over." He pauses. "It was the beginning. I just couldn't see it yet."
"That's..." I swallow. "I'm glad it worked out for you."
"It didn't 'work out.' It blew up and I rebuilt." He turns to look at me. "The scary part isn't the blowing up. The scary part is believing that someone will still want you when they see all the pieces."
I nod because I can't speak. He means well. He's being generous and honest and he has no idea that the thing he's describing — the heat, the pregnancy, the forced reckoning that rebuilt his life — is a door I can't walk through. He got pregnant and it changed everything and he rebuilt and now he has Noah and Lawson and this full, loud house. The pregnancy was the catalyst. The body cooperated. The biology did what it was supposed to do.
Mine didn't. Mine can't. And no amount of blowing up is going to change that.
"You okay?" Kole asks gently. "Sorry, I didn't mean to—"
"No, you're fine." I take a breath. "I think I just needed some air."
We stand together for another minute, silent, and then the door opens and Lawson sticks his head out and says "babe, Noah just put his hand in the curry" and Kole sighs the sigh of a parent who has sighed this sigh a thousand times and goes inside.
I stay on the porch alone for a moment and press my palms flat against the cold railing and breathe.
When I go back in, Ray is sitting on the floor with Noah in his lap. Noah has been cleaned up — mostly — and is leaning back against Ray's chest, drowsy, his thumb in his mouth. Ray has one arm across the toddler's stomach, holding him steady, and the other is gesturing as he talks to Alex about something. He looks down at Noah and adjusts his grip and the movement is so natural, so easy, so much like a father, that I have to look away.
Lawson sees me looking. "He's good with kids," he says, handing me a fresh glass of wine. "Must be the uncle practice."
"Noah needs a cousin his own age," Devon says from the couch, pointing at Ray. "Get on that."
"Working on it," Ray says, easy and laughing, and the room laughs with him and I smile because that's what my face is supposed to do and inside I am falling through the floor.
The evening winds down. Gabriel has been asleep for an hour. Noah is fighting it — he wants to stay up with the grown-ups, which mostly means sitting on Ray's lap and aggressively trying to give everyone his pacifier. Kole is cleaning up and gently refusing help. Lawson is wrapping leftover food into containers and pressing them into people's hands.
"You sure you don't want a ride?" Devon asks me at the door. Alex is holding a sleeping Gabriel and a bag of leftovers and looks like he's been ready to leave for approximately two hours.
"I've got him," Ray says, keys already in his hand.
Devon looks at Ray. Looks at me. Doesn't say anything. Hugs his brother with one arm and says "call me tomorrow" in a tone that means "tell me everything."
The car is quiet. Not the tense quiet of Thursday morning — something softer. The streets are dark and the neighborhood gives way to downtown and then my building, and Ray pulls up to the curb and puts the car in park.