POV: Jasmine
The feeding always began the same way — a small, insistent sound that rose from silence with the patience of something that had never been told no.
Aurora didn't cry so much as announce herself, and at two in the morning the sound moved through me like a current before I was fully conscious.
I was already lifting her before my eyes opened.
I settled back against the headboard and let her find what she needed, pressing my lips to the top of her head. "There you are," I whispered. "Right on schedule."
She made a soft sound against my chest. Not an answer. But something close enough.
"Bad timing, sweet girl," I told her. "My brain just woke up. It does that. You'll understand when you're older and you have a mother who can't stop thinking at two in the morning. You'll find it incredibly annoying, and you'll be completely right."
I smoothed the back of her head with one palm. "Okay. I need to find a pen. Then we go straight back to bed, I promise."
I'd been tracking her feeds on a notepad on the nightstand — times, durations, which side — trying to find a pattern in her hunger, trying to make something predictable out of what still felt beyond my control.
I settled her against my chest and crossed the room quietly, leaving Liam breathing in the dark. His desk sat in the corner where it always had, and I opened the top drawer by feel.
The pen was there. I should have gone back to bed.
My hand touched the edge of a manila folder instead.
I didn't recognize it. That was what stopped me — the simple fact that after all these months in this space, of knowing the geometry of his desk the way you learn any inhabited territory, this folder was unfamiliar.
I carried it to the armchair and turned on the small lamp. Aurora continued feeding, her small fist pressed against my sternum.
I opened the folder.
"Okay," I breathed. "Okay. Let's see what we have."
Two documents, filed together. The first I recognized immediately — the Virtue Exchange paperwork.
The auction contract, the transaction record, the digital signature I'd made with trembling fingers on the night when saving Leo felt like the only arithmetic left available to me.
"I've never seen it printed out," I whispered. "Isn't that strange? The whole thing happened and changed my entire life and I never once saw it on paper until right now, in your father's armchair, at two in the morning, while you eat."
I pressed my lips to her hair. "That's us, baby girl. Wild from the very beginning. You came into an interesting family."
I closed that one and turned to the second.
My employment contract. The one I'd signed at the moment of my promotion, late on a Tuesday afternoon, when someone placed it in front of me with a pen already uncapped and the implied understanding that this was formality — that people like me didn't call lawyers over paperwork like this.
Page fourteen stopped me.
"I should have read it better," I murmured. "I know. I was so relieved I stopped being careful. That's what happens when you've been scared for too long — you relax at exactly the wrong moment, and you sign things you should have had someone look at first. You assume the people handing you the pen are on your side."
I touched the top of her head. "You are going to read everything. Every single word of every single thing anyone ever puts in front of you. No matter how late it is, no matter how relieved you are. I'm teaching you that before anything else. Before how to ride a bike. Before your own name."
The clause was buried in a section headed ‘Intellectual Property and Creative Contributions During the Term of Employment.’
Dense with subclauses and definitional references to earlier sections, the kind of legal architecture designed to be impossible to hold in the mind all at once.
I read it three times.
"It covers everything I made," I told her. "Every lyric I rewrote in a session that ran past midnight. Every arrangement I touched because someone asked and I said yes because I loved it and because I didn't know to protect what I was giving. All of it. There was language in my contract the whole time that said the company might own it. And I signed it. And I never knew."
I pressed my thumb gently to her cheek. "Your mother has been giving things away her whole life without reading the fine print. That stops now. I mean it this time."
"I don't fully understand it," I said quietly. "But I understand enough."
I put both documents back precisely as I'd found them. Replaced the folder in the drawer. Turned off the lamp.
Back in bed, I shifted Aurora so her cheek rested over my heartbeat.
"I'm not going to panic," I told her softly.
She stirred faintly. "I know. You'd find the panic version much more entertaining. But that version of me makes decisions she regrets, and I can't afford that right now." I exhaled slowly.
"What I know is this: he has both documents. Together. In the drawer beside his bed. And I don't know what that means yet. It could mean a lot of things. It could mean something terrible."
I paused. "I'm not deciding which at two in the morning. I've made that mistake before. I burned things down that way."
"I've never been good at waiting," I continued, softer still.
"You'll learn that about me. I want to wake him up right now and just know. But that's not fair — not at this hour, not with you in my arms. And there's a version of this where I ask him tomorrow and he has a completely reasonable explanation and I'm glad I waited."
I felt her weight settling deeper into me. "That's the version I'm choosing to believe in tonight. I'm allowed to do that."
"I'm not the same person who signed that contract. She didn't know how to protect what she was building. She didn't even know she was building anything worth protecting."
I looked at her closed eyes, the impossible softness of her face. "I know now. And I'm not going to let anyone take it from me without making them explain themselves first. Not even him." A pause. "Not without hearing what he says."
Her breathing deepened and slowed until the almost-wakefulness finally left her — that total surrender that belongs only to people who haven't yet learned that sleep requires defending.
"I love you," I told her, knowing she was gone. "More than I know how to say yet. We're still figuring out the language, you and me."
I pressed my lips to the top of her head. "And I'm going to figure the rest of it out too. That's what I do. That's what I've always done."
Morning was still hours away. I did not wake Liam.