Page 2 of Silver Fox's Twin Babies

My office was all the way in the back of the building, adjoining Jacob’s. When he offered me this job as his executive assistant, I was floored. After the twins were born, I was so hard up for a job that I applied to be a paid intern, and he elevated me to C-suite level. I knew people thought I’d gotten special treatment, but he put people in their places. My dad left him with one dying wish—that he take care of me as if I were his own, and he had.

When I walked past his office, his head popped up and I knew he’d be in to see me in a matter of minutes. I sat at my mahogany desk and used my compact mirror in my purse to dab some powder on my face and freshen up so he wouldn’t know I’d been crying. I had barely gotten my purse stashed in my desk drawer when he rapped on the door and walked in.

“Got a sec?” Jacob said, standing in my doorway. It was hard to look at him and not see my father. They were bosom buddies, did everything together. He’d been gone eight years now, and not a day went by that I didn’t miss him.

“Sure,” I said. There was no enthusiasm in my tone, and it didn’t escape him.

“How did it go?” Jacob strolled into my office across my dark Berber carpet with his hands in the pockets of his gray slacks. He was tall, towering over my desk as he stood to my right looking down at me.

“Horrible,” I sighed, and I dropped my head. “Parker is really struggling, though Vera continues to excel.” The same iron grip I’d had on my purse strap in the classroom returned, but this time on my chair’s armrest. I found myself doing that when I was nervous, gripping something tightly. My therapist, whom I’d stopped seeing months ago thinking I was fine, told me it was my subconscious trying to work out how to be in control when there was no way I could control things.

“I’m so sorry to hear that.” Jacob sat on the corner of my desk and rested a hand on my shoulder. I looked up at him with a frown and tears in my eyes again. Jacob was the closest thing I had to a father or brother, and I appreciated deeply how he cared for me.

“I can’t let them be separated. You know how much I don’t want that.”

“Why would they have to be separated?” His eyebrows drew together in confusion.

“They want Vera to go to this gifted program, and they want Parker to join a teacher who can help him with his struggles, or they may have to hold him back.” The words tasted bitter, souring on my tongue. Just saying them reaffirmed my hatred for the idea of them being apart.

“Well, don’t get too worked up. I’ll see what we can do.” He stood again and I stood too and wrapped my arms around his chest. For a second, he seemed shocked and then his arms encapsulated me. I needed my father, but he was the next best thing.

“It’ll be alright, Amber. You’ll see. Evan went through some of the same things. Okay? Let me see what I can dig up. We’ll get Parker the help he needs without neglecting Vera.” He patted my back and I pulled away nodding, swiping at my eyes. I knew to take him at his word because he’d never failed me.

“I have to run out to a meeting. Catch you after work?” he asked. My nod of assent was my goodbye too. I sank back into my chair and rested my head on my folded arms on top of my desk.

I was so thankful for Jacob’s presence in my life every day. It felt like a part of my father was still here with me every time he took a moment to check on me.

He really had been there for me, fighting for my little family in every way, including fighting his own board for my job. And the fact that he knew everything and held my confidence was more special, though he had lectured me many times about coming clean.

But at this point, there was no reason to. Evan had no interest in the truth. He came back from Europe five years ago with a woman on his arm, and I knew then that I’d made the right choice. Not telling him about the twins was the right thing. He had the life he wanted to live and I wasn’t part of it at allanymore. The fact that he lived in a town twenty minutes away and never asked about me was proof enough.

What we had was nothing but a blip on the radar. The sex was amazing, but he never wanted anything more than that. And I had moved on, with Jacob’s help, and his wife’s. Together with my mother and my best friend, I’d come out of that deep depression and I was doing fine. I just had to fight for my kids the way this tribe of people around me fought for me. I could do this.

After I cried a bit more…

2

EVAN

Ileaned back in my chair, rubbing my eyes after hours of staring at the data on the screen. The engineers were still talking—tired but driven. Each of us was trying to push forward the next phase of our renewable energy initiative. We were deep into testing a new energy storage system, the kind that could change the way we think about solar and wind power. The numbers were promising, but there were always variables to consider. I glanced up from the spreadsheet and caught Sarah’s attention.

“Talk to me about the efficiency gap in the storage model,” I said. “You said it was down by 5 percent last week, but we’re still seeing a plateau. What’s holding it back?”

Sarah adjusted her glasses and kept scrolling through her tablet. “It’s the hybrid system. The integration of the backup power source is slowing things down. It’s working, but not as seamlessly as we’d hoped.”

“We need to stabilize that hybrid transition,” I said, tapping my pen against the table. “If we can’t get that smooth, the whole system falls short of what we’re promising investors.”

“I think it’s the capacitor design,” Ben chimed in, leaning forward from the far end of the table. “We’re pushing it too hard in one direction. Maybe we scale back the output and optimize the power flow instead of maxing it out.”

The back and forth was draining me for this entire project, not at all energizing me like it used to. I scrubbed a hand over my stubbled chin and turned to look out the window. The conversation continued with a bit of bickering over the best way to fix our situation, and I got lost in thought about other things, namely how life seemed to be stuck on repeat.

Days were long. Nights were short. I worked fourteen-hour days, ate alone, and slept heavily only to wake up the next morning and do the same thing like a hamster on a wheel. Not at all the way it was when I spent time in Europe. However, back then I had a zest for life. A zest that slowly dissipated the longer I was there and fell flat when my feet touched ground back home in Buffalo.

My eyes raked over the view of Crescent Springs out my window. It was dreary, even for October in New York. Or maybe the rose-colored lenses I’d seen the world through for so long had dimmed with the passage of time. Maybe I had changed, not the scenery, and maybe my jaded view of life was what truly colored my vision.

“What do you think?” Sarah asked, and I snapped back to attention to see her eyebrows high and her eyes wide.

“Think?” I asked. I hadn’t been paying attention to a word they said.

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