Chapter 221: Reid
Not even thirty minutes in we pass a billboard—BEST MILKSHAKES ON THE EAST COAST—and Jake is already taking the exit. In the rearview, her eyes pop open; she cheers, claps once, smile so bright it’s a safety hazard. Jake watches her in the mirror too long; I nudge his arm back to the lane. He’d do anything to keep that smile. So would I. It’s the most beautiful thing I know.
Inside, we stand at the counter and grunt at a menu with thirty flavors. “There are three real milkshakes,” I inform the universe. “Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. Nobody needs birthday-cake-cotton-candy-confetti.”
“Grumps,” she declares, delighted. She orders salted caramel pretzel and makes a face at us until we pick something we’ve never had. Jake goes s’mores. I take Oreo cheesecake. Fine—they’re good. Really damn good. She steals sips from both, then back to hers, then back again, perched on my lap and flirting with Jake while he pretends to guard his cup and fails.
People look. Concerned, curious, confused. It hits me that we’ve never really shown it in public, the three of us at once. The twin thing is obvious; you can see two versions of the same man and do the math. A few lingering stares connect the rest: the way she’s tucked into me and talking with her hands at him. Some men look jealous, some pissed off, some… worried for her.
I like showing the world she’s ours almost as much as I like the days it’s just me and her and every room knows she’s mine.
Now Jake drives. I take passenger. Madeline’s in the back, curled and out, the kind of sleep that drops like a curtain as soon as the road starts to hum.
“This girl sleeps a lot,” Jake says, amused.
“She burns a lot of fuel,” I answer. “Talks every minute she’s awake, waves her hands through half of it, smiles and jumps and overthinks the rest.” I glance back at her tiny fist tucked by her cheek. “And with how her fingers and toes and nose are always cold, I wonder if she’s low on iron. We should get it checked—maybe she won’t be so sleepy.”
Jake nods, eyes flicking from the road to the mirror. “I like her sleepy sometimes.”
“Me too.” The word sits warm in my chest. Her breath fogs a little circle on the window; every exhale is a feather against the glass.
He checks the mirror again, protective sharpening the line of his mouth. “She shouldn’t lie down like that.”
“Why.”
“Dangerous if we get in an accident.”
I tip him a look. “Planning to crash the car?”
He groans. “No.” His hand tightens on the wheel anyway, that automatic Anderson response to the word accident.
The highway unspools—white lines ticking under us, sodium lights smearing into gold. Condensation rings sweat down the milkshake cups in the console; her straw still smells like caramel and salt. I watch the road a beat longer, then say, “You noticed the looks back there?”
“Of course.”
“What do you think they were thinking?”
He lifts one shoulder, casual on purpose. “Age difference, probably.”
I turn in my seat. “Not the three-people thing?”
He huffs a laugh. “That too. But we just turned thirty and she’s twenty-two. And we’re six-three; she’s five-three. She looks so small between us. To strangers, she probably reads like she got caught in this situation.”
The thought hits clean and cold, like someone cracked a window. I replay the milkshake shop in my head—her on my lap, grinning at Jake over her cup, my palm loose at her waist; the guy by the napkin dispenser frowning like he’d found a bruise. I’d read it as jealousy, confusion, moral math they couldn’t do. I didn’t account for the picture we make at a glance: two big men, one small girl, a story people fill in with the worst parts of themselves.
I look back at her—curled on the bench, mouth soft, one hand tucked under her cheek, the other open like she fell asleep mid-reach—and the shock twists into something else. A vow, maybe. To mind how it looks without dimming what it is. To make sure the world never mistakes her choice for anything but a choice. To be the men who hold the weight of that, not the men people worry about.
“Yeah,” I say at last, voice low. “I never thought of it like that.”
Jake glances over, and for a second the twins-year-old language we don’t have to speak says the same thing in both of us: then we’ll be careful. We’ll be obvious about the right parts. We’ll make it plain she’s the axis, not the prize.
In the mirror, she shifts, sighs, settles again. I reach back and find the edge of her blanket, pull it higher over her shoulder, and watch the lines of the road keep counting us home.
The miles tick by and my head runs ahead to Northhaven like it always does—straight to the hard parts. Charlie first. We’ll bring her over, close the door, and say it out loud: we’re with Madeline. She’ll take it better than most, but it still puts a weight on the table we can’t lift back off. Then the part I hate—dropping Mads at her SWMRI house, even for a night. The idea of her on that sofa without one of us an arm’s length away makes something ugly curl under my ribs. I know it’s one night. My body doesn’t care.
Sloane next. The email. The look on her face when we ask where she got it. Maybe she talks; maybe she doubles down and we cut her loose. Either way, it’s a fight I don’t want and a line I won’t flinch from. And threaded through all of it is the man we haven’t met who thinks paper and pressure can put his hands back on our girl. That’s a storm with no forecast, and it’s coming whether we read the sky or not.
It’s going to be a wild few days—Charlie, the house, Sloane, and whatever Cruz finds when he hits town. Patrol grids and press releases on one side of the scale, locks and late-night watches on the other. I look back at the small shape sleeping on our backseat, blanket pulled to her shoulder, and the road ahead stops feeling long. It feels simple.
We hold her closer. We tell the truth to the people who’ve earned it. We take out the trash when it shows its face. Then we go back to the water and do the work she came for.