“Full weekend.”
Jamal’s easy uncle face disappeared. The attorney arrived in its place.
Hannah looked at me. “This is a trap.”
“Of course it is.”
“Beatrice?”
“She called.”
Hannah’s mouth tightened.
“What did she say?”
“That Savannah is expecting. That I should behave. That I should remember my place.”
Jamal set the invitation on the counter very carefully, as though his hands had suddenly become too controlled.
“And what did you say?”
“I told her my presence would be memorable.”
Hannah looked toward the twins, who had returned to their fortress and were arguing over whether a dragon could also be a dentist.
“Riley.”
“I’m bringing them.”
For a second, my sister did not move.
Then she whispered, “Are you sure?”
No judgment. No fear. Just the weight of what that meant.
I looked at my children. Leo had Declan’s blue eyes. Lily had the same deep dimple on her left cheek that appeared in every formal portrait of Declan’s grandfather. When the twins were babies, I used to stare at their faces in the middle of the night, stunned by the way biology could carry history through pain and still make something innocent.
“They invited me to witness their future,” I said. “It seems rude not to introduce them to mine.”
Jamal walked down the hall to his home office. Hannah and I followed, the twins trailing because they considered closed doors an insult.
His office smelled like leather, paper, and coffee. Law books lined one wall. A framed photograph from my first year out of the divorce sat on the bookshelf: Hannah holding a newborn Lily, Jamal holding Leo, me standing between them in a hospital cardigan, tired beyond language and smiling like dawn had finally found me.
Jamal crouched beside a steel safe built into the lower cabinet. He entered the code, opened it, and removed a thick manila envelope sealed with a legal clasp.
He placed it on the desk.
The label read:
Divorce Addendum
Embryo Custody Surrender
Final Executed Copy
The room went quiet.
Even the twins seemed to sense the adults had entered serious territory. Leo reached for Lily’s hand. She let him take it.
“Five years,” Jamal said.
I touched the envelope but did not open it yet.
Five years since the conference room. Five years since Declan sat across from me with two attorneys and his mother at his side, acting as if ending a marriage were a business transaction that had gone inconveniently long. Five years since he signed away every legal claim to the preserved embryos from our final family-planning treatment because he wanted no future responsibility, no financial connection, no shared decision-making, no remaining thread tying him to me.
He thought he was walking away clean.
Jamal made sure the document gave him exactly what he demanded.
Declan surrendered all legal rights.
All future claims.
All authority.
All obligations.
The embryos became mine alone.
My decisions. My future. My children.
What Declan never understood—what Beatrice never cared enough to examine—was that legal distance did not rewrite biology. It could end his role as a parent in the eyes of the law. It could protect him from duties he did not want. But it could not change where my children came from.