POV: Jasmine
Over coffee, I told him I wanted the clause looked at before it sat any longer.
"I'll find someone outside the network." He set down his mug. "No connection to Cadence. No one Jackson's people have ever touched."
"Not by the end of the week — by Friday."
"And whatever she finds, you hear it before I say a word about it. Especially if it's bad."
That was the right answer. He left for work twenty minutes later, jacket over his arm. Aurora was in the bouncer running her investigative sounds at the ceiling, systematically testing every frequency available to her.
She had been doing this for three days — a serious, methodical survey of what her voice could produce and what it could make the room do. I had started thinking of it as her version of due diligence.
I had been awake since five-thirty and the morning light was the particular flat gray of a day that hadn't committed to itself yet. I was rinsing the mug when he called from the doorway.
"Jasmine."
Not alarm. The specific register of someone who needs a witness, now, not in a minute.
He was standing over the bouncer with an expression I hadn't seen on him before — the particular certainty of a man who knows exactly what he saw and knows no one will believe him.
"She smiled." I said, excitedly.
"Liam." She gave me a sympathetic look instead, not believing at the moment.
"A real one and it wasn't a reflex. She looked at me and the corners of her mouth went up and her eyes crinkled."
I crouched beside the bouncer. Aurora looked up at me with her standard expression — neutral, attentive, profoundly unbothered. I tried the face: eyebrows up, wide mouth, the full production.
Aurora stared back with the composure of someone who had better things to do.
"She's not doing anything."
"She already did and you missed it."
I tried the clicking sound. Picked her up, put her back down, changed the angle. "What was she responding to?"
"I was explaining that the four a.m. wake-ups were becoming a pattern I found unsustainable."
I looked up at him. "Your daughter laughed at your complaint about her."
"She found my tone funny."
"Both corners? Eyes involved?"
"Yes! Duration approximately three seconds."
"That is a very specific description of a gas bubble."
"It was a smile. It looked like this—"
"Don't." But he was already doing it.
Liam's face reconstructed the expression — lips pressed up at the corners the precise way a six-week-old makes the shape, eyes crinkled, eyebrows lifted with uncomplicated delight.
He held it with total commitment. In his work jacket. In the middle of the kitchen. I stared at him as he held it.
I had seen this man in boardrooms. Had watched him face his father across a desk in the same building where everything between us started.
Seen him deliver a verdict on someone's entire career without his voice changing register. Seen him absorb a direct hit and stay standing because walking away was never in his vocabulary.
Seen him strategic and gutted and cold and tender, seen him look at me in ways that changed the temperature of a room.
Not once had he looked ridiculous.
And that was the precise thing — not any of the versions of himself he deployed on purpose, but this: completely undefended, holding a baby's expression with total sincerity because it was the only argument he had left and he had no interest in making a smaller one.
The laugh hit before I could intercept it. Not the polite kind, not even the helpless kind — the full-body kind, the one that bends you at the waist, that hadn't come out of me in months. It arrived before my mind had any say in the matter.
Liam dropped the expression.
Aurora startled at the sound — sharp, unfamiliar, her mother actually laughing — and then clearly, unmistakably, in direct response, the corners of her mouth went up.
Liam raised one finger in her direction. Steady with his eyes on me. Said nothing. I stopped laughing.
My face did the thing that happens when you watch your daughter smile for the first time — before you have any say in whether it will, before the managing part of you can get there. My throat closed. My eyes went hot.
Neither of us moved.
Then I lifted Aurora from the bouncer and held her against my chest, one hand under the back of her head, and looked at Liam over the top of her.
He was watching both of us. Jacket on, bag by the door, late for work and entirely unbothered by it. The stillness of someone exactly where he intends to be.
The morning light came through the window and landed on all three of us.
"You were right."
"I know."
"The face was ridiculous."
"The face worked."
"The face worked because I laughed and startled her into it."
"Results are results."
I looked at him over Aurora's head. He looked back — not triumphant, just steady, the way he was steady when he had been right about something he cared about.
"She's going to do it again," he said.
"Not on my schedule."
"No. Hers." He looked at Aurora with an expression that was still new on him — not the boardroom certainty, not the careful attention he gave to difficult things. Something that had no professional use and no strategic value. "She's going to have strong opinions about what earns a response."
"She already does."
"She gets it from you."
"She gets it from both of us. Don't be modest."
He didn't argue it. Not with things like this.
We stayed there in the morning light — Aurora against my chest, Liam watching both of us, the three of us still in the kitchen while the city outside went on doing its ordinary Tuesday things.
His phone buzzed twice in his jacket pocket. He didn't reach for it and neither of us moved.