Page 122 of My Brother's Billionaire Best Friends
I nod. “Just now.”
He walks over, sets the glass down on the porch rail beside me, and wraps an arm around my waist. His palm settles low, just above my hip, warm and steady. “Think your mom suspects what kind of night we have planned?”
I lift an eyebrow. “She told me to ‘enjoy myself’ with a smirk, Harrison.”
“Ah. So, she definitely knows.”
“She knows everything.”
He kisses my temple. “You ready to be worshiped?”
I smile into his chest. “God, yes.”
Once Harrison pulls me inside, I shed the final layer of lingering tension. For the first time in months, I hear the hush of our space. The waves in the distance. My own thoughts.
It’s been a year since everything blew up and settled into this—whatever this is. A domestic dream made entirely of chaos, caffeine, and the kind of love that shouldn’t exist outside of fairy tales. And I wouldn’t trade a second of it.
Even the messy parts. Especially the messy parts.
Like the two stalkers we picked up after the VT press coverage hit its stride. Apparently, being a high-profile polyamorous pregnant person was enough to warrant a few unhinged deep-dive threads, which led to some guys taking up too much interest in me.
Gavin warned me, of course. He said celebrity-adjacent press cycles came with their own ecosystem of weird. But nothing prepares you for finding out that someone made a Pinterest board of your outfits—or worse, a fanfic series about your “poly billionaire baby drama.”
Jack still brings that up sometimes when he wants to make me groan. “Episode three had great character development,” he’ll say, completely deadpan. “I like how they made me a secret Russian prince.”
That’s how we knew we needed better security.
So now we have it. A team installed cameras discreetly and made sure every entry point in the house is locked up tighter than a Pentagon server. I fought it at first, but then Lucy was born, and suddenly safety felt like something holy.
The birth was fast. Faster than I expected. Gavin drove me to the hospital, Jack kept yelling from the back seat about the bag we forgot, and Harrison held my hand the whole way, calm and solid even when I threw up in his lap.
Lucy came into the world pink, loud, and absolutely perfect. She looked like Lyra the moment she opened her eyes, but with Gavin’s nose and a tiny fist that latched around Harrison’s thumb like she was claiming him on sight.
I’ve never cried so hard in my life.
We didn’t announce it to the press until a week later. Darla handled the rollout. “Smart and personal,” she called it, and honestly? She nailed it. A single photograph, a caption about joy, and the internet lost its mind for all the right reasons.
The foundation Harrison and I started launched two months later. We named it The Marigold Project, after my favorite flower—and because we didn’t want anything too obviously connected to our names. It’s quiet work, behind the scenes, but it matters. We focus on outreach for unhoused teens, providing not just shelter but wraparound services—counseling, mentorship, legal support. It’s not perfect. But I’ve never felt more useful.
Harrison built the advisory panel carefully. I swear I saw him cry once after our first roundtable meeting, but he blamed it on the allergy meds. Jack rolled his eyes for ten minutes straight.
Speaking of Jack, he’s become the world’s most obnoxiously proud dad. He calls Lucy “the tiny overlord” and lets Lyra sit on his shoulders whenever she wants, even when we’re in the middle of Trader Joe’s. Levi worships him, obviously. And honestly? So do I.
All three kids call them Dad, Daddy, and Pops now. Jack is Dad. Gavin is Daddy. Harrison—somehow, hilariously—is Pops, and even though he pretends to hate it, I catch the way he softens every time Lucy babbles it at him from her highchair.
Gavin, for all his cool composure, has folded completely into fatherhood. He’s the first to hold Lucy in the morning, the last to check on her at night. He read every parenting book we bought—twice—and has a running spreadsheet of developmental milestones that he updates with such dedication that our pediatrician offered him a job.
He also has a relationship with his father now. With his stepmom. With siblings he’d never met until last fall. There was a moment, just before Christmas, when his half brother handed Lucy a handmade ornament and Gavin had to excuse himself from the room. When I followed, I found him standing on the balcony, eyes red, holding his phone and staring at a photo of his teenage self like he was trying to speak to someone across time.
I didn’t say anything. I just took his hand.
Vivian, as far as we know, moved to Thailand.
There was a grainy photo published in some tabloid of her in a silk robe and enormous sunglasses at a rooftop bar in Phuket. No one’s heard from her since. Jack swears she’s pulling strings behind the scenes, quietly rebuilding. Gavin’s not so sure. Harrison says she’ll come back when it suits her. I try not to think about her at all.
Phil…is Phil.
He still keeps his downtown apartment, still insists he doesn’t want to be a “weird bachelor uncle living out back,” even though the guys offered him a cottage next to Mom’s more than once. I think he’s still adjusting. Still figuring out what it means to be okay with all of this. But he shows up. Brings birthday gifts. Lets Lyra paint his nails when she asks. Gave Lucy a stuffed elephantthe size of a beanbag and pretended not to cry when she giggled at it.
