Chapter 3 THEY'RE ALREADY

BRADLEY Pov

Julian had the documents spread across my desk before I'd even taken my coat off, which told me everything about how the morning was going to go.

"You look like a man who already knows what I'm about to say," I told him.

"I look like a man who's been up since five reading your grandfather's will for the fortieth time hoping the language changed overnight." He didn't smile when he said it. Julian had been my lawyer for six years and my closest friend for twenty, and the two roles had a way of colliding in my office more often than either of us liked. "It didn't change, Bradley. I need you to actually hear that this time."

"I've heard it."

"Then hear it again, because in ninety days it stops being a hypothetical and starts being a court filing." He slid the top page toward me, a paragraph I could have recited in my sleep by now. "A legally recognized heir. Unborn or born, doesn't matter which, your grandfather was specific about that much at least. But it has to come with documentation. Proof of pregnancy on record, and proof of paternity that can survive a challenge. Miss either one of those and it doesn't matter whose blood is actually involved. The shares move."

"To her."

"To your stepmother's side of the family, yes." Julian didn't say her name if he could help it, not since the year she'd tried to have him quietly removed from the board's approved counsel list for reasons that had nothing to do with his competence and everything to do with how little she could control him. "Your father votes with her on everything now. You know that better than I do."

"My father hasn't had an original thought in a decade."

"That's not an argument, that's a eulogy for a man who's still alive." He said it without heat, the way he said most things that were true and unpleasant. "I'm telling you this as your friend before I tell you as your lawyer. Whatever you think of her, whatever she did to you growing up, she is very good at reading a clock. She has been counting down the same ninety days you have, and she has a candidate ready."

I didn't need him to explain who. I'd known for three weeks, since the moment Selene had told me, standing in the kitchen of an apartment my stepmother had conveniently arranged for her to have, that she was carrying my child.

I want to be clear, if only to myself, about what I felt in that moment. It wasn't joy. It wasn't relief, not really, though relief was in there somewhere, buried under something heavier. It was the particular, ugly clarity of watching a door close and a different door open in the same instant, and understanding that you were going to walk through the second one whether you'd chosen it or not.

"The papers for Wren," I said. "Are they ready?"

Julian's jaw worked once before he answered. He'd been at our wedding. He'd stood up when Wren walked in wearing her mother's dress, and he'd told me privately, three drinks into the reception, that he'd never seen me look less like myself, in the best possible way. He had opinions about this that he was choosing, out of loyalty, not to share with me now.

"They're ready," he said instead. "I need you to actually read the settlement before you hand it to her, Bradley. Don't just slide a folder across a table like you're closing an acquisition."

"That's exactly what it is."

"It's your marriage."

"It's ninety days from now being the end of everything my grandfather built," I said, sharper than I meant to. "I don't have the luxury of treating it like anything else."

He didn't argue further. He'd learned a long time ago which arguments with me were worth losing and which ones weren't.

I picked Selene up on my way home, because she'd asked to come, and because some cowardly part of me hadn't wanted to walk into that house alone. She sat in the passenger seat with one hand resting low on her stomach the entire drive, watching the city go by like she already owned a piece of it, which, depending on how the next ninety days went, she might.

"Are you going to tell her about the baby today?" she asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't hers to know yet," I said, which was the kind of answer I gave when I didn't want to admit the real one - that some instinct in me still flinched at the idea of Wren hearing it from my mouth in the same conversation as the word divorce.

Wren was already at the table when we came in, like she'd been expecting us at that exact hour, which unsettled me slightly even though I couldn't have said why. I'd built up, without meaning to, an entire private rehearsal of how this would go. Raised voices. Questions I didn't have good answers for. Maybe tears, though Wren had never been a woman who cried easily, not in front of me.

I set the folder down between us. "I've asked for a divorce," I said. "The papers are drafted. I need you to look them over and sign."

She asked if there was someone else, and I told her it wasn't relevant to the settlement, which both of us understood was its own kind of answer. And then she did something I hadn't planned for, hadn't rehearsed a response to at all.

She opened the folder. She read it in silence, faster than I expected, and she picked up the pen I'd brought without being asked and signed her name exactly where it needed to go.

No argument. No tears. No question about what she'd done wrong, or what I'd stopped feeling, or when, none of the things I had steeled myself against for a week. Just the scratch of a pen and her steady hand and a calm that didn't match anything I knew about her.

It should have felt like relief. Instead something in my chest went cold and wary, the particular unease of watching a door open too easily, like the resistance you expected had simply decided not to show up.

"Thank you," I said, because I didn't have anything else ready.

"You should go," she told me. "I'm sure you have somewhere to be."

I did. I checked my phone on the way to the door out of habit more than need, a message from Julian I didn't have the attention to read yet, and behind me I heard her footsteps follow us as far as the hall, though I didn't understand until much later what she'd wanted to see with her own eyes.

Selene was already waiting there when Wren appeared behind me, and I introduced them with a sentence I would spend a long time regretting the flatness of.

Wren didn't say much. She smiled, congratulated us, and there was something in the way her eyes dropped once to Selene's stomach that I filed away and didn't examine, because I had a company to save and no room left that week to wonder what my soon-to-be ex-wife was thinking.

The moment the door closed behind her, Selene laughed.

It wasn't a cruel sound, not exactly, but it had an edge to it I hadn't heard from her before, something almost giddy with relief. She turned into me and wrapped both arms around my neck, and I felt the small, solid curve of her stomach press against me as she pulled close.

"She's leaving us for good," she said, against my ear, still laughing. "At last. I was starting to think she'd fight it."

"She didn't fight anything."

"I know." Selene pulled back enough to look at me, one hand settling low over the child I'd been told for three weeks was mine, and something in her expression didn't quite match the warmth of her voice. "At least I'll deliver safely."

I didn't ask her what she meant by that. I told myself it was nothing, a strange thing to say, the kind of sentence that only sounded ominous because I was tired and the ninety-day clock in my head hadn't stopped ticking since Julian first said the word ninety out loud.

But I kept turning it over on my way upstairs, the calm on Wren's face when she should have broken, and the small, cold thing underneath Selene's laughter that I couldn't name and didn't like.

Something about that day didn't sit right in me. I just didn't yet know which woman I should have been afraid of.