Gio hadn’t gone to the launch. Arianne offered him the option twice, both times without pressing, and both times he’d told her the estate needed someone and the twins had already claimed him for the night. It wasn’t a lie. It also wasn’t the whole answer, and she hadn’t asked for the rest of it.
Aunt Estella had the television on before dinner even finished, the primetime segment queued up on the channel guide like she’d been tracking the schedule all week. Lily sat cross-legged on the rug directly in front of the screen, close enough that Aunt Estella made her scoot back twice. Leo sat beside his sister with his lion doll tucked under one arm, less interested in being close to the screen than in being wherever Lily had decided to plant herself.
"Is it starting yet?" Lily asked for the third time.
"When it starts, you’ll know. There’ll be music." Aunt Estella settled into the armchair with a mending basket she had no real intention of touching tonight.
Gio took the other armchair, Lexx propped against his forearm and chest, one small fist working itself open and closed against his shirt. Lexx had spent the better part of an hour cycling through moods — fussy, then curious, then briefly furious about nothing anyone could identify — and had finally landed on something close to contentment, kicking his legs against Gio’s arm like he was testing whether they’d hold his weight yet.
"He’s going to be a runner," Aunt Estella said, watching the small legs go. "Mark my words. That one won’t stay put past his first birthday."
Gio adjusted his grip so Lexx’s kicks had somewhere to land without either of them losing balance. He didn’t answer. He rarely needed to with Aunt Estella. She filled silences the way other people filled forms, efficiently and without waiting for permission.
Lily twisted around from the rug. "Uncle Gio, make him laugh."
"I don’t do the faces."
"You don’t do anything." Lily said it without malice, the flat assessment of a six-year-old stating a fact. "Leo, you do it."
Leo obliged without needing to be asked twice, screwing his face into something between a fish and a startled owl. Lily added her own version beside him, wider, more theatrical — she’d taught Leo the routine in the first place, and it showed. Lexx watched them both with the intense, unblinking focus he brought to anything new, and then broke into a squeal that startled even him, both fists opening at once like the sound had escaped his whole body instead of just his mouth.
"There it is," Aunt Estella said, satisfied, like she’d personally engineered the outcome.
The music Lily had been waiting for cut in from the television, the network’s primetime theme swelling over an aerial shot of the ballroom Gio had helped source three months ago, back when Meridian Artists had been nothing but a spreadsheet and a set of contracts nobody outside the family had seen yet. The twins scrambled up onto their knees in unison.
"There’s Uncle Franz!" Lily pointed at the screen, as if the television might otherwise have missed him.
Franz stood at the podium mid-sentence, the room behind him a wall of lights and lenses, Noah Hart’s practiced ease settled over him the way it always did on camera. The narration ran over the footage, something about the agency’s unconventional model, the mentorship structure, the three founding artists, and then the camera cut wide before finding its way to the side of the stage.
Arianne stood there in profile, her attention fixed on Franz the same way it fixed on everything that mattered, giving nothing away to a room full of people who would have paid for the reaction. Gio had seen that exact posture across boardrooms and hospital hallways and, once, a courtroom. It meant she was holding something and had decided the room didn’t get to see what.
"There’s Mommy Aria too!" Leo pointed, softer than his sister but no less pleased.
The narration moved on to the campaign numbers, and then the segment cut to a hallway interview setup, a different reporter, a different backdrop, Sam seated across from a woman with a notepad. Sam’s hair had been redone since the ballroom shot, her expression arranged into the particular brightness she wore for cameras, warm and quick and entirely under her own control.
"She’s talking about the show," the broadcast reported, condensing whatever Sam had actually said into six seconds of airtime. The clip cut to Sam laughing at something off-camera, head tipped back, the kind of laugh that read as effortless because she’d spent years making it look that way.
"Aunty Sam is so pretty on TV," Lily announced to the room in general.
Leo nodded his agreement, already losing interest in favor of resettling his lion doll.
Gio said nothing. His eyes didn’t move off the screen the whole time Sam’s face filled it, tracking the small changes underneath the practiced brightness, a flicker at the corner of her mouth when the reporter asked something she hadn’t expected, the half-second recalibration before her next answer. He’d learned to read those tells years ago, back when reading her had been something he let himself do on purpose instead of by accident.
She’d been everywhere the past several months. Billboards on the drive to the office. A magazine left open on Arianne’s desk. A clip someone in the building had been watching on their phone during a lunch break he’d walked past without meaning to look and looked anyway. He hadn’t gone looking for any of it. It found him regardless, the way certain things did once you’d stopped being able to pretend they didn’t matter.
The segment moved on to weather before anyone in the room registered the transition, and Aunt Estella reached for the remote to mute it, her attention already redirecting to the twins’ bedtime.
"Bath, then teeth, then two stories, not four," she said, in the tone that ended negotiations before they opened. "Come on, both of you."
The twins went without much protest, worn down enough by the day that even Lily’s usual bargaining instinct had given out. Gio stayed behind with Lexx, who had started working his fist toward his mouth in the specific way that meant he was hungry and hadn’t yet worked out how to say so.
He warmed the bottle himself, nothing in the kitchen but the low hum of the bottle warmer and Lexx’s increasingly insistent noises against his shoulder. Feeding him was one of the few tasks in this house nobody had assigned Gio. He’d started doing it on his own the first week home from the hospital, and nobody had ever suggested someone else take over. Lexx settled the second the bottle reached him, small hand coming up to rest against Gio’s fingers like he needed the extra contact to trust the food would keep coming.
By the time the bottle was half gone, Lexx’s eyes had started losing the fight, lashes drooping and lifting and drooping again in the rhythm of a baby who knew he was supposed to stay awake and had already lost the argument with his own body. Gio carried him up to the nursery before he could fully surrender, the house settled around them, the twins’ bath running somewhere down the hall.
Aunt Estella arrived a few minutes later with a fresh diaper and pajamas already in hand, moving through the routine with the unhurried competence of someone who’d done this for more children than the family currently on record. Gio stood to one side and let her work, watching Lexx’s small chest rise and fall as sleep finally won.
She settled him into the crib, adjusted the blanket a fraction of an inch, and stood back to watch him the way she always did, like she needed a full minute of proof before she trusted the room to hold him without her.
"He’s growing so fast," she said, her voice pitched low so it wouldn’t wake him. "Feels like yesterday he couldn’t hold his own head up. Give it a year and there’ll be little feet running this whole estate ragged."
Gio didn’t answer. His attention stayed on Lexx instead, the small rise and fall of him under the blanket, steady and uncomplicated in a way nothing else in this house ever managed to be.
His sister had changed everything about herself since they’d come back to Montclair — rebuilt a company, buried a betrayal, married a man who actually deserved her, had this child sleeping four feet away from him now. She’d done all of it in motion, one decision after another, never pausing long enough for the ground to catch up with her. Gio stood in the same nursery doorway he’d stood in the night Lexx came home from the hospital, and it occurred to him, not for the first time, that he’d been standing on the exact same patch of ground the whole time, watching everyone else learn how to walk.