POV: Finn
There was a specific look Liam Blackwood got when he was holding something heavy and trying not to show it. The tie slightly loose, the jaw set, the eyes tracking too carefully, too deliberately, cataloguing the room without landing on anything.
He had been wearing it since he walked in the door.
He dropped into the chair across from me and said nothing for a moment. He didn't need to — his face had already told me everything his morning had been. The coffee shop was quiet around us, the early crowd thinning out, a low murmur of other people's conversations filling the space between us.
"You look terrible," I told him.
"Good morning to you too, Finn."
"I mean it affectionately. You have the face of a man who just found out his favourite restaurant has a health code violation." I leaned back. "What did Asher do?"
Liam looked at me.
"What?" I said. "You chose a coffee shop three blocks from Cadence with no industry foot traffic. You texted me 'now' with no other context. Either Asher did something or the building is on fire, and you don't look smoky." I tilted my head. "Also I have something to tell you, and I think we both know we are here for the same reason."
He pulled the loose end of his tie straight and folded his hands on the table. "You go first."
I paused for a beat too long, but eventually I went first.
I told him about the bar. The drinks, the particular stillness in Asher when he reached for the glass of water and nearly put it on the floor.
I told him about the look on Asher's face afterward — not surprise. Not alarm. Just exhaustion that had been there long before that evening and had nothing to do with the hour.
I told him Asher had admitted there was something — nothing specific, nothing named, just the shape of an admission — and asked me not to say anything. Not to Liam. Not to anyone.
"He asked you for how long?" Liam asked.
"He said a few days. To sort some things. He used those exact words. Sort some things." I pressed my thumb into the table. "I held it for weeks, Liam. Weeks of watching him work like nothing was wrong and answering my texts in one sentence and not once picking up the phone. And then you sent me 'now' this morning."
Liam was quiet. Outside, a bus pulled away from the curb. Someone at the counter laughed at something. The ordinary morning continued doing what it did, indifferent to the two of us sitting across from each other with Asher's name between us like a stone neither of us wanted to pick up.
"You're breaking the promise," Liam said finally.
"I'm breaking the promise to you and only to you, and only because you clearly already saw something. So don't make me feel worse about it than I already do." I pointed at him. "Your turn."
He put everything on the table. The bookcase Asher had grabbed on his way across the office. The coffee cup that went over when he stood too fast.
The leg — right side, not taking weight, favouring it in a way only visible if you already knew how he moved. And then the question about Jackson, and the half-second before Asher answered it, like he was deciding something.
We sat with it.
"Right," Liam said.
"He is not going to tell us on his own." I said it out loud because one of us had to. "Whatever this is, he has decided he is handling it. Which means he is handling it badly and alone and with full commitment to the bit."
"I know."
"So what do we do?" I asked. "Because I will tell you right now, if your plan involves cornering him in a professional setting, he will put on the Asher Blackwood face and we will leave that room knowing exactly as much as we know right now, which is nothing."
"I know that too." Liam rubbed the back of his neck. "Ambushing Asher is the fastest way to lose him entirely. He doesn't break under pressure, he just becomes less accessible."
"So we don't ambush." I stopped. Thought about it. Thought about Asher sitting across from Aurora at dinner, letting her put a piece of bread directly on his suit jacket without moving, watching her with that expression he only got around her — unguarded, slightly helpless, completely real.
"Dinner. Your place. The four of us plus Aurora. He cannot professionally deflect in a room with a toddler in it. She has already dismantled his entire defence system and she doesn't even know she's doing it."
Liam looked at me for a moment. "That might actually work."
"Of course it works. I am consistently underestimated in this family." I straightened up. "There is one more thing. Jasmine."
"Right," I said. "We cannot carry this without her, and you know it. She reads Asher better than either of us do. And if we try to handle this without bringing her in and it turns out to be something real—" I shook my head. "She will not forgive either of us. And more importantly, she shouldn't."
Liam did not argue. He pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and held it on the table between us, unlocked, Jasmine's name already at the top of the recents.
He did not text.
I watched him sit with it — the weight of making it real, of moving it from the two of us in a coffee shop to something that included her, that made it an actual thing the family was doing together instead of two men speculating over a table.
His phone rang.
The screen lit up in his hand and we both looked at it at the same time, and the name on it was Asher.
Liam looked at me, and I said nothing. There was nothing to say, so he picked up.
"Liam." Asher's voice came through tight enough that I caught it from across the table. "Did you just talk to Finn?"