Chapter 497: Nine Other Things

Lexx gnawed at his teething ring in the playpen behind her chair while a board call ran two feet from his head and a crayon standoff broke out behind both of them, none of the three ever quite colliding into the others. Three weeks into the vigil, and mornings like this one had become ordinary instead of impossible.

"That clause stays in," she said into the laptop propped on the family suite table, one hand already reaching across to separate Lily from the purple crayon Leo had apparently declared his for the afternoon. "If the vendor wants to renegotiate delivery terms, they can do it before signing, not after. Send me the redline tonight and I’ll have it back to you before the market opens."

"Understood, Miss Summers. I’ll loop in legal." The voice on the other end paused. "How is—" 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

"Send the redline." She ended the call before the question finished, because there wasn’t an answer that fit inside a business line, and set the laptop aside to deal with the actual emergency in front of her, which was Leo holding the crayon over his head while Lily reached for it with Petal the dinosaur clutched under one arm for backup.

"Share it or lose it," Arianne said, and Leo handed it over without a fight, because he’d learned in the last three weeks that she didn’t have the patience left to ask twice.

The suite door opened before either twin could start a new argument, and Amanda came through it already shrugging off her coat, Vincent a step behind her with a bag of the twins’ school things she must have picked up herself. "We heard there was a coloring crisis," Amanda said, crouching to Lily’s height. "I happen to be an expert mediator. Ask anyone."

She set a second bag on the counter on her way past, the ginger tea and the plain crackers Arianne hadn’t had to ask for since the first week she’d told them, and didn’t make a production out of either one. "You’re a lifesaver." Arianne stood, rubbing at the crick that had settled into her neck sometime around the third call of the morning. "The board wants a decision on the vendor contract by tonight, and I still haven’t called the school about Leo’s project."

"I’ll handle the school." Vincent set the bag down and held out a hand for it, already reaching for his own phone. "You handle the board. That’s the arrangement, remember? You don’t get to do both."

"I remember." She didn’t entirely believe it yet, not the way she’d need to for it to actually change anything, but she let him take the twins’ folder out of her hands anyway.

Lucas called twenty minutes later, before she’d finished the vendor redline, his voice moving at the clipped pace of a man budgeting exactly the minutes he had for the call. "Two outlets are asking for comment on the Blackwood liquidation and trying to angle it toward Rochefort Group by association. I’ve got a statement ready that keeps our name out of it entirely. I need your sign-off, not your input."

"Send it." Arianne skimmed the two lines he forwarded and approved them without changing a word, because Lucas’s instincts on this had never once needed her correction. "Anything from the reporters camped outside the estate?"

"Nate walked past them yesterday and told one of them to move his van before it got towed. That was the whole interaction, according to Gilbert." Lucas’s tone didn’t warm, exactly, but it eased half a degree. "He’s better at that than either of us gives him credit for."

Julian texted before Nate arrived, a single line with no greeting attached to it: Summers Corporation’s stock ticked up again this morning, third day running, nobody’s saying why yet. Arianne read it twice and set the phone face-down without answering, unwilling to let Rafael take up any more of the day than he’d already taken without even being in the building.

Nate arrived in person an hour after that, a folder under his arm that looked almost ordinary next to the one Lucas had carried through the same doorway weeks earlier. He set it on the table without ceremony.

"Gilbert had the paperwork finalized this morning," he said. "Signed, filed, done. The bar and the restaurants are officially collateral until I pay it back, which I intend to do faster than anyone expects."

"You didn’t have to bring it here yourself." Arianne opened the folder anyway, scanning the signature line at the bottom, Gilbert’s handwriting beside Nate’s in the witness column.

"I wanted you to see it closed before you heard about it secondhand." Nate closed the folder again after she’d looked her fill. "You told me this wasn’t a transaction. I still needed the paper to say it was one, for my own sake. That doesn’t mean I forgot the rest of it."

"I know exactly what it means." She set the folder aside, on top of the stack that already held the vendor contract and Leo’s school forms, three unrelated obligations sharing the same six inches of table. "How’s Mikaella?"

"Cleared for another checkup next month. Rohan agrees with her better than Montclair ever did." Nate glanced toward the hallway, toward the room none of them ever had to name out loud anymore. "Any change?"

"No." She said it the way she’d said it to a dozen people that week, flat enough not to invite the follow-up question, and Nate had known her long enough not to ask it anyway.

Aunt Estella called an hour before the twins were due to leave, her voice coming through the speaker with the particular briskness she reserved for logistics. "I’ve got their beds turned down and Leo’s science project supplies laid out on the kitchen table already. You are not to worry about either of them tonight. You are to worry about yourself, which I notice you’re terrible at."

"I’ll try."

"Try harder than that." Something eased in her tone even as the words stayed firm. "I raised your mother and I helped raise you. I can manage two seven-year-olds and a poster board for one evening. Let me have this."

"Thank you, Aunt Estella." Arianne meant it more than the short sentence carried, and from the pause on the other end, she suspected Aunt Estella heard all of what didn’t make it into the words.

She carried Lexx down to Franz’s room before the twins left, needing five minutes that belonged to neither the board nor the paperwork. Lexx reached for the collar of Franz’s hospital gown the second she set him on the edge of the bed, small fist closing around the fabric and tugging, testing it the way he tested every door and drawer and patience in his path lately. "Dada," he said, plain and certain, the word he’d started aiming at Franz alone in the last week. He tugged again when nothing happened, patted at Franz’s cheek with an open palm, and looked up at Arianne when neither one worked, confused in the specific, wordless way babies got confused when the person who was supposed to answer didn’t.

"He’s going to answer you eventually," Arianne said, catching Lexx’s hand before he could try a third time, kissing his knuckles instead of Franz’s for once. "He’s just slower at it than you’re used to." Lexx accepted the redirection the way he accepted most disappointments now, folding into her shoulder and staring at Franz’s face like he expected an explanation she didn’t have to give him yet.

By evening the suite had emptied out again, Amanda and Vincent gone home with the twins for the night at Aunt Estella’s insistence that they needed one full night of normal sleep in their own beds, Lexx already down in the portable crib in the suite’s back room because he still needed her more hours of the day than he didn’t, and Arianne sat alone at the table with the vendor contract still open in front of her, the words swimming in a way that had nothing to do with the lighting.

Gilbert found her there a little past nine, a bag of takeout in one hand that he set down directly on top of the contract without asking permission. "You haven’t eaten since this morning. I checked with the nurse’s station, since apparently that’s a thing I do now."

"I had coffee."

"Coffee isn’t a food group, no matter how many board calls you’ve survived on it today." He pulled out the chair across from her and sat, nodding toward the folder Nate had left. "I heard about the paperwork. That’s one thing off the list, at least."

"It’s one thing." Arianne pushed the contract aside far enough to make room for the food, more out of surrender than hunger. "There are about nine others behind it. The board wants an answer on the vendor by tonight, Leo’s project is due Friday, I have a checkup of my own tomorrow that Amanda’s already offered to drive me to, and I still haven’t figured out how to be in two places at once when both of them need me at the same hour."

"You’re not supposed to figure that part out alone. That’s the whole point of everyone who keeps walking through that door." Gilbert opened the containers without being asked, sliding one across to her. "Uncle Vincent took the school problem. Julian took the press. Nate took himself off your list of things to worry about today. Let the board wait until morning, because they will, whether you like it or not."

"And if I can’t let it wait?"

"Then I’ll physically close the laptop myself, and you can be furious with me about it tomorrow." He said it without any real threat in it, the kind of thing he could say because he’d earned the right to years ago. "You don’t have to hold every piece of this at once. You just have to hold the pieces nobody else can."

Arianne ate in silence for a while, the takeout doing more for the ache behind her eyes than she’d expected, and let the vendor contract sit closed for the first time in six hours. "I keep thinking if I put one thing down, the whole rest of it falls apart behind me."

"Nothing’s fallen apart yet. Not on my watch, not on Julian’s, not on Uncle Vincent’s." Gilbert nodded toward the hallway. "Go sit with him for a while. I’ll answer the board myself if they call again tonight, and I’ll tell them exactly where to direct their patience."

The hallway to Franz’s room was empty by the time she walked it, three weeks of the same route worn familiar enough that she could have made the turns with her eyes closed. She settled into the chair beside him, the shape of it fitted to her by now the way a favorite coat fits after enough winters.

"I signed off on a vendor contract today without you arguing me out of at least one clause," she said, her hand finding his without needing to search for it anymore. "Your father took over Leo’s science project. Your mother mediated a crayon war and started keeping ginger tea in the suite before I’d even asked. Lexx tried to talk you awake by pulling on your collar this afternoon, and when that didn’t work either, I don’t think he understood why. I didn’t have a good answer for him. Nate finally let Gilbert help him without flinching, and I think that might be the biggest miracle to happen in this hospital all month." She kissed his knuckles once, the same silent punctuation she used every night now instead of a proper goodbye. "Everyone knows about the baby now except you. I told your parents the week after I found out, because I couldn’t keep carrying it around this family without them seeing it on my face eventually, and none of them deserved to hear it secondhand. I’m seven weeks along tomorrow. I have a checkup in the morning, and out of everyone who already knows, you’re the only one I actually want to tell."

The monitor didn’t waver, didn’t care what she’d just confessed to a man who couldn’t hear it yet, and Arianne stayed until the ache behind her eyes finally won out over the nine other things still waiting for her attention, letting herself, for one night, believe Gilbert when he said none of it would fall apart just because she’d stopped holding all of it herself.