Life after the Pryce situation settled into something I had not entirely planned for.
Calm.
Not the absence-of-problems kind. Carter Group was a living thing and living things always had problems. But the specific texture of threat that had followed me from the moment I married Kade receded, and what was left was something that felt, for the first time, simply like life.
James and Nora were six months old and had developed opinions. Nora's were expressed through prolonged eye contact and a furrow between her brows that was entirely her father's. James's were expressed loudly and at length in a voice that suggested he had things to say and resented his current linguistic limitations.
I had gone back to work part time at seven weeks postpartum, which Kade had disagreed with and I had don
