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“It usually is.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand, the same brief, grounding gesture I recognized in Theo the first time he ever did it to me. “Go tell him. All of it. Trust him with it. He’s stronger than either of you give him credit for.”

I sit in the parking lot for twenty minutes before I can make myself start the car.

The ultrasound photo sits on the passenger seat where his coffee usually goes, two small gray shapes that don’t look like anything yet and somehow already look like everything. I hold it, and I think about nine days, and I think about the specific calculus of waiting versus telling, and something in me that’s been holding the line since the pharmacy floor at Northfield simply gives out.

I can’t wait nine days. I can’t wait nine hours. Twins changes the whole equation — the risk, the timeline, the sheer scale of what I’ve been managing alone — and sitting here with two heartbeats on a piece of photo paper, “after Nationals” stops being a plan and starts being a thing I did to myself and to him, a decision I made on his behalf the same way decisions have always been made for him his whole life.

I understand, sitting in this parking lot, exactly what I’ve been doing. I understand it in a way I couldn’t quite let myself understand it before.

I start the car. I point it toward Haven.

Raven House is loud when I get there, the specific afternoon chaos of a house full of guys with nowhere else to be — Cash’s music drifting from somewhere upstairs, the TV going in the living room, the smell of something frying in the kitchen that’s probably Wyatt’s doing, since Wyatt’s the only one of them who actually knows how to cook.

Cash sees me first, from the kitchen doorway. Whatever he was about to say dies on his face the second he actually looks at me.

“Hey — Margo?” He steps out, concern immediate and unguarded. “You okay?”

I don’t answer right away, because I’m not sure my voice will hold if I try, and Cash’s expression shifts further, alarm replacing the easy greeting.

Wyatt appears behind him, drawn by the change in Cash’s voice. He doesn’t say anything. Just looks at me with the specific quiet attention he brings to things that actually worry him.

Beau comes down the stairs a moment later. I watch all three of them do the same thing in quick succession — read my face, read whatever’s written there that I haven’t managed to hide. Go still with the specific concern of people who’ve learned to take this house’s emotional temperature seriously.

“Margo.” Beau’s voice is careful. Gentle. “What’s wrong?”

“Where’s Theo?” My voice cracks clean in half on his name, the exact thing I was afraid would happen.

Something passes between the three of them — a look, quick and wordless, the kind of communication that happens between people who’ve lived together long enough to not need full sentences. Cash opens his mouth, maybe to ask something else, and Beau puts a hand up, small, subtle, a captain’s gesture that means not now.

“He’s in his room,” Beau says. Quiet. “Working on his game dev thing. You want me to⁠—”

“No.” I’m already moving toward the stairs. “I’ve got it. Thank you.”

Beau doesn’t stop me. None of them do. But I feel their eyes on my back the whole way up, three people who clearly understand something significant is about to happen in this house and have decided, wordlessly, to give it room.

Theo’s door is half-open, headphones on, stylus moving across the tablet propped on his desk, completely absorbed in whatever armor plating or environment texture he’s building for a fantasy world four classmates will ever see.

He doesn’t hear me at first. I stand in the doorway for a second, watching him — the specific concentration on his face, the particular ease of him when he’s building something with his hands instead of carrying something with his whole body — and some part of me wants to turn around, go back downstairs, wait for a version of today that doesn’t have to break this.

I don’t turn around. I’ve done enough waiting.

“Theo.”

He looks up. Pulls the headphones down around his neck. His face does the thing it always does when he sees me — warmth, want, the specific brightness reserved only for me. Then, almost immediately, something else moves across it as he actually registers what my face looks like right now.

“Margo.” He’s already standing, already crossing the room. “What happened? You’ve been crying.”

“I need to tell you something.” My voice is shaking. I let it shake. I don’t have the energy left to manage it into something steadier. “I need you to just — let me get through it. Please.”

He goes very still. Nods once.

“I’m pregnant.” The words come out unpolished, nothing like the ethics-defense version of me that usually handles hard truths with structure and argument. Just the fact, bare, finally said out loud to the one person it was always supposed to be said to first. “It’s yours. It’s twins. And I’ve known for six weeks.”

The room goes completely silent.

Not tense-silent, not the loaded quiet before an argument. Just silent, absolute, the specific stillness of a person absorbing something too large to process in real time. Theo doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. His face does nothing at all, the wall coming down so fast and so completely that for a second I don’t recognize him.

“Theo.” I take a step toward him. “Please say something.”