"Okay..."
"What were you doing before Miles?"
I blink. "What?"
"Before the conference. Before the case. Before whatever happened between you two. What were you doing with your life?"
"I was working. The job—"
"The job I guilted you into taking because you were bartending and sleeping till noon." Devon isn't being mean. He's being Devon, which is worse because Devon is usually right. "What's your plan, Ray? Not your plan for getting Miles back. Your plan. For you. For your life."
"I don't — this isn't about me right now. Miles is—"
"Miles is a grown man who made a choice and you can't control that. What I'm asking is: if he never comes back. If this is it. What does Ray Garcia's life look like?"
I open my mouth and nothing comes out. Because the honest answer is: I don't know. Before Miles, I was showing up to a job I didn't care about and going out on weekends and calling Devon when I was bored. I was fun. I was charming. I was the guy who makes everyone laugh and has no plans past next Thursday.
"That's what I thought," Devon says quietly.
"That's not—"
"You've been orbiting him for months." Devon's voice is careful, like he's handling glass. "The case, the dinners, the late nights. Everything you've done since the conference has been about Miles. I get it — I do. He's important to you. But you can't build a life out of someone else, Ray. You can't show up and say 'choose me' when you don't even know what you're offering besides—" He gestures vaguely. "Yourself."
"What's wrong with myself?"
"Nothing. But who is that? Without Miles, without the case, without the charm-your-way-through-it routine — who are you? What do you WANT?"
The question sits in the room like a weight. Gabriel fusses again and this time Alex gets up to check on him, and I'm left with Devon looking at me with an expression that's the most loving version of get your shit together I've ever seen.
"I don't know," I say. And the honesty of it is worse than the heartbreak.
Alex comes back with Gabriel on his shoulder. The baby is half-asleep, thumb in his mouth, doing that heavy-breathing thing babies do when they're fighting it. Alex sits back on the arm of Devon's chair and looks at me.
"When Ethan died," he says, and the room goes very still because Alex almost never talks about his brother, "I spent two years trying to disappear. I drank, I isolated, I made myself into someone nobody could love because I thought that was safer." He adjusts Gabriel on his shoulder without looking away from me. "Grad school was the first thing I did for myself. Not to escape, not to impress anyone. Because I heard a sound in a studio and I thought, I want to make that. That one thing that was mine was the foundation I built everything else on. Devon. Gabriel. This."
He doesn't say go do that. He doesn't give advice. He just looks at me steadily and says, "You can't save someone else from drowning if you don't have your own ground to stand on."
They go to bed eventually. Devon hugs me at the hallway entrance — a real hug, long, the kind where he puts his chin on my shoulder and squeezes — and says "I love you, idiot. Figure your shit out." Alex nods at me from the doorway and that nod carries more than most people's speeches.
I'm on the couch. The apartment is dark except for the nightlight in the hallway and the glow of the city through the curtains. The couch smells like Devon and Alex and baby and home. My body is still wrong — the pre-bond ache hasn't faded, just dulled from a scream to a steady throb — but the warmth of Devon's apartment takes the edge off the way it can't fully fix.
Gabriel wakes up at one-thirty. I hear the murmur through the wall and I'm up before Devon can be, moving on instinct, the way I always move toward a need. I find him in the crib, fussing, his small face scrunched in the dark. I pick him up and he settles against my chest immediately — my scent, my heartbeat, the familiar uncle smell — and I carry him back to the couch and sit in the dark with a baby drooling on my shirt.
He's so small. His hand grabs a fistful of my t-shirt and holds on and his breathing evens out and he's asleep in under a minute, just like that. Trusting without question that the arms holding him are safe.
Miles called himself a dead end. He said broken. He said my body doesn't work. He said it like a verdict, like evidence in a case he's been building against himself for twelve years.
I think about what he looked like when he said it. Not the words — the face. The way his voice cracked on love and kept going. The way he wrapped his arms around himself afterward like he was trying to hold himself together and failing. The way he pressed his back against the wall and said if you touch me Iwon't be able to do this and what that sentence actually means — not I don't want you to touch me but I want it so much that I can't survive wanting it.
He can't have children. His body can't do what omega bodies are supposed to do. That's real. That's a loss. I'm not going to sit here and pretend it's nothing because it's not nothing — it's a piece of the future he thought he'd have, and it was taken from him when he was sixteen, and he's been building walls around the wound ever since.
But.
Gabriel shifts on my chest. His tiny fist tightens on my shirt and his mouth makes a sucking motion in his sleep and he's here because Devon went into an unexpected heat and Alex was the only alpha around and nothing about it was planned. None of these families were planned. Kole and Lawson weren't planned. Adoption exists. Foster care exists. Families are built a hundred different ways that have nothing to do with whose body did what.
Miles called himself broken because he can't get pregnant. He looked at me holding Noah at the Shaw firm and his expression shattered, and now I know why. He saw the thing he thinks he can't have and he decided the kind thing was to take himself out of the equation before I figured it out and left on my own.
He's wrong. He's so completely, devastatingly wrong. Not because the barrenness doesn't matter — it does, it's real, it's part of who he is — but because he thinks it's the most important thing about him, and it's not. It's not even close. The most important thing about Miles Covington is that he kissed me back in that stairwell for one second before his fear took over, and in that second, he was the most honest he's ever been.