POV: Jasmine
"We're coming home," I told Nora, and I was already reaching for my coat.
Liam had the check settled before I finished the sentence. I was still pulling on my coat when he held the door. We were out of the restaurant in under three minutes — two people who had been parents long enough that a sick child in the night needed no coordination — each of us already knew our part.
Liam drove. I stayed on the phone.
Nora talked me through every symptom in a flat, precise tone — frightened and not letting it reach her voice. Temperature, colour, when it had started, what Aurora had eaten.
I listened and asked the right questions and watched the city move past the window. I felt the helplessness of being in motion when I needed to already be somewhere else.
We pulled up to the building. I was upstairs before Liam found a space to park.
Leo was on the couch when I walked through the door. Aurora was sprawled across his chest, red-cheeked and boneless with misery, a damp washcloth over her forehead.
She had one fist closed around Leo's collar. Nora stood at the end of the couch with the thermometer, her face composed, her eyes moving over Aurora with the focus of someone already running through next steps.
I crossed to the couch without stopping. Leo shifted and I took Aurora from him, and she whimpered once — small, exhausted — and burrowed against my collarbone. I pressed my hand to the back of her head and held her there.
There you are. I have you.
I sat with her until my pulse came down and hers evened out. Liam came in and sat beside us without a word, still in his jacket, one hand at Aurora's back.
Nora and Leo stayed until the fever dropped.
They made tea none of us drank. They ordered food that sat untouched in its containers. Leo held Aurora for a long stretch while I went to the bedroom to change.
I needed jeans and Liam's old sweater from the bottom of the drawer — the one that still smelled like him after a hundred washes. I could not have explained that need, but it was real.
When I came back, Nora read my face without asking permission. She had always done that.
"We're heading out," she said. "So you can put her down yourself."
“Thank you for tonight.”
At the door she pulled me into a hug and said against my hair that they would do this again — the dinner, the restaurant, everything, a do-over without a fever at the end of it. I told her I was holding her to that.
Leo hugged me after. He held on a beat longer than the hug required. Solid in a way that still surprised me sometimes — the muscle memory of a smaller boy replaced by this person who wore his own skin like it fit, who had grown into himself somewhere between the farm and now without me quite tracking when it happened.
"I'm proud of you," he said. He said it once, quietly, without preamble and without building to it.
"I'm proud of you back," I told him. And I was.
They left. The apartment went quiet in the way it did after a full evening — not empty, just settled, the three of us the only ones left in it.
Aurora fell asleep on my chest on the couch, her breathing evening out, the heat dropping beneath my palm.
Liam carried her to the crib. He came back and settled beside me in the dark, and I leaned into him and he put his arm around me.
He kissed the corner of my mouth — slow, deliberate, no urgency in it, just his mouth saying the thing that words had already covered tonight. My hands moved to his tie. His went under the hem of the sweater, warm against the skin at my waist.
His mouth at my jaw and my fingers at his collar. Aurora asleep down the hall, the apartment still around us, the two of us moving with the ease that came from having nothing left to perform for each other.
His fingers spread at the small of my back. I turned my face toward his neck.
And then it surfaced — not gradually, but all at once, a detail that had been sitting at the edge of my attention since the restaurant, waiting for a moment of stillness to make itself known.
I pulled back. Liam opened his eyes and looked at me.
"At the restaurant," I said, my voice quieter than I intended. "When my phone rang and it was Nora — Leo didn't look surprised."
Liam stilled under my hands.
"He was already reaching for his keys," I said. "Before I spoke. Before he could have heard anything from Nora's side."
I felt the shape of it solidifying as I said it — it had not registered in the moment, my attention pulled entirely to Aurora and the door.
"He already knew there was a chance she would call. He was already ready to leave."
"I don't know what that means exactly," I said. "But Leo had the folder. He is the one who drove to the ranch. He is the one who came back knowing something he did not tell me. And tonight he was already reaching for his keys before I spoke a word."
I looked at Liam. "Whatever they planned to get us home early — it was not about Aurora's fever. That was the occasion. Not the reason."
Liam was watching me closely. His jaw had gone still. He had heard not just what I said but what I was working out as I said it.
"He already knew there was a chance she would call. He was already ready to leave."
The room held the silence.
"I don't know what that means," I said. "But today at home, between Nora and Leo, was bigger than Aurora's fever. And I missed it."
Liam was watching me closely. His jaw had gone still and he had heard not just what I said but what I was working out as I said it.
I thought about Leo's hand already at his pocket before I said a word. The way Nora had not reacted when he reached for his keys — had not looked over, had not registered it as anything unexpected. The way you did not react to something you already knew was coming.
As if the possibility of leaving early had been something they had already discussed.
As if the evening had contained a contingency they had planned for and chosen not to share.
Neither of us said anything else for a moment.