Three days of silence, and my body is staging a full-scale revolt. Not a metaphor, not a flutter—a bone-deep ache that lives behind my ribs and worsens every hour I spend away from them.
I sleep in fragments. Eat in negotiations my stomach wins by refusing everything except crackers and ginger tea. The pregnancy symptoms sharpen in their absence as if the baby has registered a protest I didn't authorise.
The special encore performance at three a.m. leaves me curled on the bathroom floor with my cheek against tile that's never cold enough, one hand pressed to my stomach, arguing with biology.
I work from a hot desk near the finance team on seven—a floor where none of the Wallace brothers have reason to appear. The people here know me only as the will challenge woman, and their careful indifference should feel like relief.
It feels like amputation—clean, surgical, the phantom limb aching worse than the real one ever did.
Spencer respects the boundary completely. No texts, no drop-ins, no rerouted meetings. The absence of his attention is its own kind of presence—a shape cut out of every room I enter.
Blake sends one email, purely professional: a document for the hearing, attached without commentary. The sign-off reads B. Wallace, and the restraint in those two words costs him something I can measure by what he didn't add.
Miles is following Spencer’s lead and sends nothing—no texts, no emails, no carefully casual drop-ins. The silence from a man who has never met a feeling he didn't want to hand-deliver is how I know this is destroying him.
It's destroying me too, but I'm not prepared to admit that to anyone—least of all the bathroom mirror at three a.m. that keeps showing me a woman who looks exactly like someone who misses three men she's supposed to be furious at.
On the third evening I come home to find a box on the doorstep. No note, no name, no handwriting to trace, no delivery service logo—just a white pharmaceutical box sitting on the mat like it manifested through an act of targeted, anonymous devotion.
SolaceNatal. The exact brand I'd blurted during the confrontation—the one Dr. Kaur recommended, a detail thrown in anger and forgotten. Someone caught a sentence I barely remember saying and turned it into this quiet thing at my feet.
I stand in the hallway holding the box, trying to summon anger. What surfaces instead is the recognition that someone was listening—genuinely, precisely—even while I was dismantling them sentence by sentence.
I don't know which brother sent it. I suspect all three, because the Wallace brothers have never done anything individually that could be turned into a committee operation.
"Who's the package from?" Mom calls from the kitchen with the inflection of a woman who already knows and is asking for sport.
"Nobody." I shelve the vitamins above the stove, next to the ginger tea. "Wrong address."
"Wrong address, and you're putting it in our cabinet." Her spoon taps the edge of her soup bowl—a gavel, a mother's percussion instrument of choice when the cross-examination is about to begin. "Sit down, Bailee."
I sit, because when mom uses that voice my legs comply before my pride can file an objection. The soup smells like rosemary and home and every safe thing I'm currently living without.
She studies me with an assessment that has twenty-four years of data behind it. "Who are you punishing—them or yourself?"
"Both." The word comes out before I can dress it up. "Equally and with dedication."
"That's honest." She pushes the soup closer with the firm authority of a woman who has been feeding stubbornness out of people for decades. "But does the punishment have an end date, or are you planning to be miserable through the entire pregnancy on principle?"
My spoon hovers over the bowl. The steam curls upward and I watch it rise because looking at mom right now would mean seeing the accuracy of her question reflected in the one face on this planet I have never been able to lie to.
"I don't know how to go back." The admission scrapes my throat. "I'm furious and I miss them, and those two things are sitting in the same place without cancelling each other out."
"That's called being a grown woman in a complicated situation." Her voice softens. "The fury doesn't have to leave for the missing to be real."
"When did you get a psychology degree?" My eyes sting and I blame the steam.
"I got a daughter who hides behind jokes when she's about to cry." She covers my hand on the table. "I've been watching her do it long enough to know the difference."
I press my lips together and concentrate on the sodium content of her broth, because my composure has been load-tested for three days and the structural integrity is approximately one maternal observation from collapse.
"Your father used to do the same thing." She says it quietly, like setting down something fragile. "Deflect with wit until the room forgot he was breaking. You inherited it like a second language."
My spoon stills in the bowl. She never brings up Edric unprompted—it's a door she keeps sealed with the same precision I use on mine. The fact that she's opening it now tells me this conversation is bigger than soup.
"He'd have hated what they did." She withdraws her hand. "But he'd have understood why they did it, and he'd have told you that understanding isn't the same as forgiving—it's just the first floor of the same building."
"That's very architectural for a Tuesday evening." My voice is rough. "He taught you that?"
"He taught me that love makes people do unconscionable things and then stand in the wreckage wondering how they got there." She picks up her spoon. "Sound familiar?"
My phone lights up on the table and we both look at it. Spencer—breaking seventy-two hours of silence with one line.
Council hearing moved up. Celeste pushing accelerated timeline. We need you in the room to prepare.
Professional. Necessary. Completely devoid of anything personal—and the we in that sentence does more damage to my three-day fortress than any apology, any explanation, any grand gesture could have managed.
Mom reads the screen from across the table because mothers have a surveillance radius that defies physics. "Sounds like someone needs you."
"Someone needs a witness for a legal proceeding." I pick up the phone and the screen warms my palm. "That's not the same thing."
"It's close enough to get you in the room." She squeezes my hand once and lets go. "Take the ugly way in. You can figure out the rest from inside."
I stare at the message until the screen dims, and the professional necessity of it sits in my chest—an excuse I didn't want to admit I needed—a door someone propped open from the other side, just wide enough for a woman who isn't ready to knock.
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