The afternoon sun had turned Los Angeles into molten copper, casting long shadows across downtown sidewalks where commerce and desperation brushed shoulders. Traffic crawled toward the freeway in its eternal pilgrimage. Near a glass-enclosed bus shelter, a woman had crumpled onto the pavement as though her body had finally negotiated surrender. Two small children clutched at her, their cries cutting through the urban white noise with primal urgency.
A black Bentley whispered to the curb, its polished surface reflecting a city of angles and ambition. Behind the wheel sat the architect of his own mythology—Ethan Cole, thirty-six, whose software lived in hospital servers and municipal networks, whose product announcements drew crowds like revivals. He moved through life with the certainty of someone who had never questioned his own trajectory.
En route to another meeting where power wore tailored suits and spoke in quarterly projections, something penetrated the hermetic seal of his world. The sound of children crying—ancient, universal—breached his carefully constructed defenses as if the car’s soundproofing had simply dissolved.
“Stop here,” he instructed, and his driver’s surprise registered in the rearview mirror.
Heat rushed in when the door opened. Ethan emerged into a circle of bystanders practicing the choreography of concerned avoidance. The woman looked like strength that had been asked to carry too much for too long. Her hair fought a losing battle with the day’s demands. Fine dust marked her cheekbone. The twins—one wearing a faded shark tee, the other a pink dress with a rebellious hem—tried desperately to climb back onto safety itself.
“Has anyone contacted emergency services?” Ethan’s voice carried the authority of someone accustomed to problems that yielded to intervention.
A man in Dodgers gear raised his phone. “Already on it.”
Ethan crouched, opening his hands in offering. “Miss? Can you respond?”
Her eyelids trembled. “The babies… where are—” The words fractured mid-flight.
“Right here with you.” He turned toward the children, cataloging their distress with the precision he usually reserved for product launches. “Hey there. I’m Ethan. Everything’s going to be alright.” The introduction surprised him—habit meeting something deeper, perhaps the need to be accountable.
When the boy lifted his face, the world tilted on its axis. Gray eyes—that specific steel shade Ethan had been mocked for in childhood and praised for in board meetings. A dimple appearing on the left when uncertainty flickered across his features. The girl’s gaze followed, a perfect reflection the universe had decided to hold up for inspection.
Time folded. Ethan’s body understood before his mind could construct the narrative: the brow’s architecture, the mouth’s particular hesitation with strangers. He was confronting himself in miniature, duplicated, and reality shifted like a stage trap opening beneath his feet.
“What’s happening here?” The question escaped less as inquiry than as existential bewilderment about how years could collapse without warning.
Sirens threaded through the city’s constant hum, growing louder. The woman’s head rolled; a name emerged from her lips like a confession. “Naomi.”
“Naomi.” Ethan repeated it, and memory unlocked—a gala at the Broad, a dress matching LA’s electric-blue twilight, conversation about algorithms and aesthetics on a balcony. A sunrise departure from a hotel lobby, an apology from someone who’d been weightless all evening but needed to return to earth. He’d categorized that night as Almost and filed it away.
He hadn’t known the file remained active.
Paramedics materialized in practiced efficiency—gloves snapping, questions flowing, a blood pressure cuff hissing. “Dehydration,” one diagnosed. “Possibly low blood sugar. You’ll be fine, ma’am.” The twins refused to release their grip long enough for the stretcher to be properly secured. Their hands were anchors; their voices, alarms.
“I’m coming with them,” Ethan declared before the thought could seek permission.
The paramedic assessed him, calculating possibilities in a city where countless stories could be true. “Family?”
Ethan’s response collided with itself—instinct meeting revelation. “I’m not certain,” he admitted, and something in the medic’s expression—professional caution meeting the mathematics of those gray eyes—softened into assent.
The ambulance doors closed on the cacophony. Inside, the world compressed to white surfaces, blue uniforms, electronic monitoring of a stubborn but exhausted heart. The twins’ crying subsided into hiccups. The boy’s small fingers found Ethan’s sleeve and clung. The girl collapsed against his knee, depleted.
Ethan stared at the children, then at the empty space beyond them where his mind projected futures without consultation. High chairs positioned side by side. Laundry mountains. The complete absence of any such reality in the life he’d constructed.
At Cedars-Sinai, the ER absorbed them with practiced compassion—efficient, attentive, present. Nurse M. Ramirez triaged Naomi, initiating fluids. A social worker appeared with clipboard and carefully calibrated questions learned from a city that had perfected twenty varieties of falling. “Emergency contacts?” “Shelter last night?” “Medical history we should document?”
Lily, Ethan’s assistant, called three times while he occupied the waiting area with the twins. Three times he declined. His text message arrived like a manifesto: Cancel everything today. And tomorrow. Then, unprecedented: Don’t reschedule yet.
He purchased apple juice and two small stuffed bears from the gift shop, a credit card that had never been deployed for such modest transactions proving unexpectedly capable.
The children refused the playroom volunteers. They orbited Ethan like satellites locked into stable trajectory. Their wristbands revealed names that nearly undid him: Ava Cole. Jalen Cole. Naomi had claimed that surname without his knowledge or permission; the audacity of that hope burned behind his eyes.
Hours accumulated. When Naomi woke, her first words were questions about location and children. She struggled to sit, taking in fluorescent lighting and IV lines and unfamiliar blankets.
“They’re safe,” Ethan said from his vigil chair, voice roughened by prolonged silence. “In the play area. I stayed. They’re fine.”
She turned toward his voice, recognition hitting like a door swinging too fast. “Ethan?” His name emerged as both astonishment and complicated regret. She looked away, swallowing shame like prescribed medication. “You shouldn’t be present.”
“I believe I should.” The statement covered more territory than geography. “Naomi, we need to discuss the twins…”
Her eyes squeezed shut. Tears gathered at the corners, indecisive. “I wrote you,” she said, voice thin as thread. “Eight years back. Not immediately. Doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters.” Ethan heard how convenient this sounded but continued anyway. “I never received correspondence. If I had—” He stopped, uncertain what sentence could follow. Would he have been different? Would he have created space for life outside calendar blocks? The version of himself then had been all momentum with no peripheral awareness.
Naomi studied the ceiling. “I was twenty-one. Relying on someone from a gala wasn’t strategy. I knew that writing. But I wrote anyway. My grandmother had just died. I was alone. I thought you should at least know.” Her mouth twisted. “Your assistant auto-replied that you couldn’t accept unsolicited correspondence.”
Shame scorched Ethan’s throat. He could visualize the automated message, how his office had insulated him from anything unprofitable. “I apologize,” he said, words he’d rationed most of his life. “I missed eight years. That can’t be undone. But I can be present now.”
“And accomplish what?” Naomi asked without hostility. “Magazine covers? A nondisclosure agreement as consolation? I’m not a crisis for you to transform into press strategy.”
Ethan shook his head. “No media. No cameras. If this becomes public, it’ll be your choice.” He drew an unplanned breath. “I want paternity testing. Not from doubt—I can see the evidence—but because I want to establish facts in a world that trades in narratives. And if I’m their father, I won’t be a checkbook donor. I’ll be present.”
Naomi’s eyes cut to him. Skepticism had served her well; he could see it circling. “Presence isn’t schedulable,” she said. “Not biweekly visits. It’s scraped knees and daycare pickups and grocery store meltdowns triggered by cereal box placement.”
“I can learn cereal,” Ethan said without smiling.
They listened to the ER’s whispered symphony—curtain rings sliding, shoe squeaks, murmured concern suspended permanently beneath hospital ceilings. Finally Naomi nodded once, a motion barely distinguishing itself from a flinch. “Alright,” she said. “Facts first.”
The test required swabs, signatures, chain-of-custody documentation Ethan read as if thoroughness could redeem anything. While awaiting results everyone already knew, Cedars discharged Naomi with instructions about nutrition, rest, follow-up. Social worker Tasha, armored in kindness and a sunflower headband, entered with resources for housing and childcare and conversations conducted with respect.
“We have transitional program space in Echo Park,” Tasha offered. “Not a shelter. A next phase. Case management, childcare assistance, job placement.”
Naomi’s jaw set stubbornly, a gesture Ethan would learn meant she was refusing to complicate hard things further. “I’ve overstayed couches,” she said. “I won’t place my children in another room with strangers if alternatives exist.”
Tasha nodded as if she’d had this conversation countless times that month. “Understood. Let’s explore alternatives.”
Ethan stood. “I can assist. Apartment. Food. Whatever’s needed.” He looked at Tasha so she’d hear this as offering, not entitlement. “However you recommend structuring it without creating precarity.”
“Good,” Tasha said, and Ethan appreciated her immediately for that single word delivered without suspicion or awe. “We’ll construct a plan. Stability first. Pride doesn’t nourish children. Neither does pity. We’ll target dignity.”
Within forty-eight hours, Naomi occupied a small two-bedroom in Koreatown with a courtyard growing determined bougainvillea. Ethan funded the deposit and six months’ rent through a trust that made the landlord shrug rather than investigate. He stocked essentials until Tasha said, “Moderation, Rockefeller,” then purchased a sensible stroller after Naomi selected the model. He hired childcare specialist Carmen to assist temporarily while Naomi’s body remembered how to forgive exhaustion.
When paternity results arrived—four pages, a percentage so definitive it resembled a verdict—Ethan left the envelope sealed on his kitchen counter for an hour while he paced his house’s perimeter. The Brentwood estate had been his achievement trophy: angular glass, a lap pool reflecting cool intentions, art acquired with advisors who used acquisition twice per sentence without irony. It looked diminished with the envelope on the counter.
He drove to Koreatown carrying figs, whole-milk yogurt, and granola advertising itself as both rustic and artisanal. Naomi opened the door in a bleach-defeated t-shirt and an accidental smile. “Simultaneous napping,” she said, relief resonating. “Which constitutes a national holiday in some countries.” Then she saw the envelope and her expression reset. “Is that—?”
“Yes,” Ethan said. “Can I—?” He lifted the bag. “Adult snacks. Boring variety.”
They opened the envelope together at the small table by the window while Ava and Jalen constructed and demolished block towers with scandalized delight.
Ethan read the opening paragraph and abandoned pretense of stoicism. He gripped the chair back. “Alright,” he said to the room, to Naomi, to himself. “Alright.”
Naomi watched his face like reading complex weather patterns. When he looked up, she nodded once—as if granting a promotion with an instruction manual. “Welcome to requiring personhood,” she said without heat, only truth.
He started appearing.
He appeared with correctly installed car seats in a truck that had never transported anything more emotionally significant than prototypes. He appeared with wipes Carmen taught him to deploy one-handed while preventing toddler gravity experiments. He appeared with board books Naomi had already library-borrowed twice and laughed when she told him to return his store copies because ownership wasn’t necessary.
“Libraries are socialist,” he teased.
“Libraries are civilization,” she countered. “Now read Goodnight Moon with conviction.”
He appeared at two a.m. when Ava’s fever made apartment walls feel claustrophobic. He appeared with pediatrician questions that raised doctor eyebrows: “I wish all parents prepared this thoroughly.” He appeared with properly-fitted toddler socks and sincere apologies for three consecutive days of wrong-sized diapers. He learned to measure success in sleep hours and applesauce ounces and precise sippy cup angles preventing spills. He learned snack theology. He learned nap liturgy.
He also learned appearance costs.
His COO Victor, jaw like a parking structure, entered Ethan’s office after a week of absences. “We need to discuss optics.”
“Optics?” Ethan asked without looking up from spreadsheets, unprepared for this confrontation.
“Rumors circulate,” Victor said. “A woman. Children. Press can smell stories before they cook. We should establish narrative protecting the company. We frame this as charitable, community-minded. Establish a foundation. Announce grants for—”
“I’m establishing a foundation,” Ethan interrupted, “but not as defensive strategy. The company survives without my constant presence. If it doesn’t, I built it incorrectly.”
Victor stared like encountering foreign language. “Your job is running an empire, Ethan, not auditioning for PTA.”
“My job,” Ethan said evenly, “is being the person my children can locate in school auditoriums and know will be there when lights rise. Everything else is scheduling.”
Victor blinked. “We’ll revisit this at the board meeting.”
“Schedule it,” Ethan said. “I’ll Zoom if Ava’s ear infection becomes team sport.”
The board didn’t overthrow him. PR didn’t sacrifice him. Wolves did, however, loiter outside Naomi’s building one morning, long lenses masquerading as concerned citizenship. Ethan walked straight across, hands pocketed, in a voice belonging to both CEO and father: “Photograph me. Leave her alone.” He took Naomi’s trembling phone and installed an app auto-sending photos to secure drives and blurring minor faces. “I’ll obtain a restraining order,” he said, and did.
When gossip sites published speculation anyway—WHO ARE ETHAN COLE’S SECRET TWINS?—Naomi turned toward walls and breathed like someone climbing from cold water. Ethan’s press office issued: No comment and Consent matters. He added privately: If this goes public, it’s because Naomi chooses so.
He sold the St. Barts vacation house without listing. He diverted proceeds to a fund called The Naomi Project, then asked permission to use her name. She stared at the check’s comma placement. “Only if the first grant goes to a Vermont daycare letting mothers complete GEDs while their children attend class.” He pointed his pen at her. “Co-founder. Executive chair. Whatever title authorizes yes and no decisions.” She shook her head. “I have two titles. Mom and student. But I’ll send lists.”
By winter, the twins recognized his knock’s sound. By spring, they yelled “Daddy!” with the same confidence they yelled “Snack!” and “Outside!” and “No nap!” He tucked them in wearing laundry-scented humility hoodies. He found himself singing “You Are My Sunshine” off-key in registers never used in boardrooms. He spilled juice. He made it right. He moved company leadership meetings to nine for eight-thirty daycare walks. He hired another senior VP without calling it weakness.
Naomi enrolled in community college, textbooks appearing beside fruit bowls. She studied nights while white noise machines made the apartment sound oceanic. She took linear notes and judicious underlining. She wore previously unseen glasses and focus Ethan recognized from mirrors. He learned not to hover. He learned laundry-folding respecting small sock existence. He learned where cinnamon lived and why. He learned that partner could describe someone once strange who now knew which bed side you avoided due to draft mentioned in passing.
Respect arrived before romance. Trust arrived like a long-discontinued bus line finally appearing: slow, then sudden, blessedly ordinary. One night, after bedtime feeling like full-body exercise, Naomi leaned against hallway walls watching Ethan close the twins’ door with bomb-tech carefulness. “You’ve changed,” she observed.
“Maybe I finally discovered what matters,” he said, surprised by the ease.
He could have elaborated. He could have described how his childhood had trained him to worship schedules as deities. His mother, an ICU nurse, worked twenty-seven years of nights and never missed school plays despite antiseptic-scented scrubs. His father had been a narrative question mark, a blank filled by long shifts and a tired woman’s one-liners. Ethan had made vows to his child-self: I’ll build something too large to ignore. I’ll never count gas station change wondering about milk money. He’d kept those vows so thoroughly he’d forgotten softer ones written in mental summer afternoons without awareness: If I ever have children, I’ll visit parks. I’ll learn dinosaur names. I’ll be the audience person. He didn’t say any of that. He simply stood two feet from Naomi and didn’t check his buzzing phone. She noticed.
When Ava reached up crossing a street saying, “Daddy, hold my hand,” Ethan felt the world align differently. He examined his palm, callused by a decade of choosing keyboards over handshakes, and decided it had finally found its purpose.
Not everything cooperated with intentions. Ethan’s mother, living in Bakersfield with monthly Sunday calls, answered the news with silence refusing to masquerade as acceptance. “Much to process,” she said, changing subjects to weather. Two days later she texted, uncharacteristically formal: If you want to bring them for a weekend, I’ll make pancakes. Never made pancakes for you. Always at work. He read twice before responding: We’ll come next month. Bring your recipe. Mine is chaos.
One June Friday, with the sky pretending memory loss about overcast conditions, Ethan and Naomi took the twins to Exposition Park. Ava insisted every dog was named Max; Jalen insisted every pigeon was baby eagles. They ate sink-washed grapes until the colander felt friendly. They watched fountains compete with the sun. A journalist spotted them, pretending to adjust sandals while phone cameras captured ten images. Ethan positioned his body between the stranger and his family, making universal not today gestures. The stranger shrugged and departed.
“Does it ever cease?” Naomi asked, weary not angry.
“It can,” Ethan said. “If we deliberately choose smaller life.”
Naomi laughed sharply. “You, choosing small?”
“I’m learning,” he said, meaning it.
That evening they ate spaghetti at the small round table, discussing budgets sensible when two line items were called Ava and Jalen. Ethan learned WIC card capabilities and limitations. He learned public library story time had waiting lists. Naomi learned that Singapore video calls from living rooms at seven still allowed responding to “My sock has weird feelings” as the emergency it represented.
When the twins finally settled—two starfish in matching pajamas—Naomi carried dishes to the sink and spoke to the window. “If you want them, you must want this,” she said, the pronoun representing a thousand unglamorous nouns. “The unposted parts.”
“I want this,” he said, and in a life full of promise-adjacent language, this felt like oath-bound commitment.
Months later, The Naomi Project opened its first community center in a rehabilitated Vermont brick building. The ribbon cutting could have televised well; they conducted it Tuesday morning without cameras. Twelve children drummed in music class while their mothers met with credit score counselors. A corner shelf of free diapers stood like walls against panic. Naomi ran her hand along paint as if the wall itself deserved gratitude. “We name rooms for donors,” the coordinator joked.
“Name one for my grandmother,” Naomi said. “Gloria Harris. She taught feast-making from pantry staples and patience.”
“And name the reading corner for Mrs. Cole,” Ethan added, surprising himself. “For weekend pancakes she didn’t have.”
They stood in their center while Ava tugged Ethan’s sleeve to display solar-system finger painting and Jalen solemnly explained block tower zoning regulations. Ethan didn’t think about margins. He thought about walls holding.
One Sunday, walking beneath jacaranda blossoms preparing sidewalk parades, Ava asked, “Daddy, are we rich now?”
Ethan lifted her, the question both funny and not. Money had always been mathematics. Now it was logistics and responsibility and non-collapsing crib prices. “We’re rich in love,” he said, wincing at the cliché.
Naomi bumped his shoulder with hers. “That’s corny.”
“It’s also true,” he said, and the twins, caring about neither truth nor corn, demanded swings.
They took turns pushing, the afternoon turning gold the way Los Angeles does when it forgives itself for freeways. Ethan looked at Naomi, face tipped toward light. Eight years back, he’d imagined her as a story he could fold into himself, an evening for remembering and misremembering. Now she was a person with keys and calendars and course schedules and laughter arriving late to her own jokes. He had no idea what they were to each other beyond parents determined to deserve their kids. He knew enough not to request labels during seasons when labels felt like fences.
Redemption, he discovered, arrives less like parades and more like checklists: appear, take responsibility, keep promises you didn’t make the first time. It’s boring, how bridges are boring once you trust them. It’s holy, how plain bread is when you realize you’re no longer hungry.
The day before Thanksgiving, Ethan stood in daycare doorways watching Ava hand Jalen a paper turkey with feathers listing Mom, Daddy, Snacks. Jalen added Blocks then, after pausing, Carmen. When the teacher glanced from cutting construction paper and saw him watching, she smiled like she’d been invited not to galas but to tables where food tasted like effort. “They’re good children,” she said. “We can tell when parents try.”
“Thank you,” Ethan said, because the sentence landed with weight he wanted to acknowledge. “We’re trying.”
Back home, he oven-baked a casserole—his mother’s recipe, texted in three poorly-punctuated perfect parts. Naomi came from class and leaned against counters the way family does when kitchens know their names. “Smells like holidays,” she said.
He thought about investor meetings missed months ago and boardrooms purposely not entered and the car that pulled over because two children cried on sidewalks in ways cities couldn’t tune out. “It is,” he said.
And because stories beginning with sirens deserve quieter returns, they sat down when the twins declared meal readiness, which was when table things looked like food and surrounding people felt like circles.
Outside, Los Angeles continued being itself: expensive, unforgiving, enormous, beautiful. Inside, Ava spilled milk and tried not crying. Jalen announced mashed potatoes resembled mountains then proved it by pushing pea skaters uphill. Naomi reached across tables and adjusted Ethan’s serving spoon grip, their fingers colliding like punctuation marks.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he responded, meaning it as apology to the past and promise to people living in his future.
He hadn’t stopped being the man who could make complicated systems work. He had, however, learned higher mathematics: you can measure success in stock prices and bedtime stories. One impresses rooms for minutes. The other makes people you created whisper your name in sleep.
And because life rarely ends where it should for neatness lovers, Ethan’s phone illuminated on counters with COO emails reminding him about emergency board calls Monday morning regarding votes he’d engineered and forgotten to care about.
Ethan silenced the phone and took more potatoes. “We’ll be at the park at nine,” he told Naomi. “I’ll dial in from benches. They can terminate me if they want. I’ll build again. But I’m not missing the slide.”
Naomi raised an eyebrow. “You in sweatpants on benches negotiating mergers while Ava yells about hot slides isn’t the worst picture.”
“Can’t be worse than my last cover story,” he said.
She laughed, the sound landing mid-table like gifts wrapped in ordinary paper.
Later, when twins slept and dishes decided to wash themselves tomorrow, Ethan stood on balconies watching city lights throw small parties in a million windows. He thought about how close he’d come to driving past. He thought about sidewalk moments when a boy with his eyes looked up and demanded another version of him. He thought about the first sentence he’d say if reporters ever got microphones near his mouth and asked for narratives.
“We got lucky,” he’d say. “We met each other in time for the part that counts.”
Behind him, Naomi slid patio doors open and stepped into night. She didn’t take his hand, and he didn’t offer it. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the space between what had been and what might become, and the city, busy as ever with its own aching, made room for a family that had decided to practice being one.

The first call of trouble came in January, the kind arriving disguised as business then sitting at your kitchen table like it always belonged there.
“Emergency board session, Monday,” Victor texted. “Investor group pushing for ‘stability.’ You should be present.”
Ethan typed back: I will be in a room. Lafayette playground. Zoom link? He added, because it felt both petty and correct: Bring scarves. Windy on slides.
He didn’t immediately tell Naomi because he didn’t want weekends becoming agendas. She discovered because she’s not the only household member reading headlines. By Sunday night she had a full-sail eyebrow and chili simmering on stoves.
“They can push you out,” she said matter-of-factly, ladling bowls. “Companies do that. They pretend genius is pizza slices handed to the loudest guy.”
“I know,” he said, accepting the bowl. “I can rebuild if necessary.”
“Good,” she said. “Because tomorrow you promised Jalen dinosaur slides, and I’m fairly certain that’s the only merger mattering.”
He saluted with his spoon. Then, because truth prefers plain words, he added, “I’m slightly scared.”
“Of what?” she asked. She didn’t weaponize the question. She set it on tables like napkins.
“That I’m only competent at being one kind of person,” he said. “And that attempting another kind erases the first person.”
Naomi considered steam from her bowl like it voted. “You were always more than one kind,” she said. “You just didn’t know which rooms let you be both. We’re making new rooms. They have Legos on floors. Try not stepping on them.”
He laughed, and the fear, while not gone, moved enough for dinner tasting like food.
Monday morning, he zipped Ava’s jacket and explained for the tenth time why dinosaurs can’t go barefoot. He carried laptop bags like props and pushed strollers with free hands. Naomi walked beside him, coffee in one hand and her own Sunday night courage redistributed to whoever needed it most.
At the park, swings squeaked. Dogs negotiated treaties. Ethan took benches, opened laptops, and logged into meetings where dozen small rectangles arranged themselves into opinion grids. Victor began. “Shareholder confidence,” he said. “Brand direction,” he said. “Narrative control,” he said. “Fiduciary duty,” he said. Wind picked up, and microphones carried it like warnings.
Naomi took the twins to slides, climbed halfway up, and stood there like people willing to be nets if gravity misbehaved. Ethan lifted two fingers to grids. “Gentlemen,” he said, polite in ways that could pass for lethal if listening carefully. “I’ll meet you later with numbers. Right now I have children needing dinosaur sounds.”
He muted, stood, and roared. Ava shrieked. Jalen declared himself apex predator and slid into his father’s arms.
On screens, men frowned. Offscreen, a father did mathematics that mattered and found it solvable.
He sat down again, unmuted, and finished thoughts: “We’re fine. The company’s fine. We’ll survive quarters in which I perform bedtime due diligence.”
“What if the press—” someone began.
“The press can call me,” Ethan said. “I’ll say the part out loud: I met my children late. I’m not missing more. If that costs us three points this quarter, we’ll recover them next quarter. Or I’ll resign and build something belonging to the world my kids actually inhabit.”
He watched grids consider whether courage was contagious. In slide frames behind him, Naomi caught Ava’s hand before physics experiments and winked at him like she knew exactly which sentence parts had belonged to the boy he’d been and which to the man he was trying to be.
The vote didn’t happen that day. It waited, like some storms do, for forecasts suiting it. Ethan closed laptops, picked up Jalen, and took swings in places where air above ground feels most like promises.
“Again,” Jalen yelled.
“Again,” Ethan said, and pushed.