The bump arrived quietly, the way important things do.
One morning Lila buttoned her jacket and it pulled slightly at the front — not enough for anyone else to see, but enough for her to stand at the bathroom mirror for a long moment with her hand pressed flat against the fabric. She was twelve weeks. The twins, the Paris clinic had confirmed on a follow-up call, were both growing exactly as they should.
She stopped trying to hide it after that. Not because she had to — she could have managed it for another few weeks under the right clothes. But hiding it felt like apologizing for it, and she had decided somewhere over the Atlantic on the flight back from Paris that she was done apologizing for her life.
She wore it to board meetings. She wore it to the Kingsley Dynamics strategy sessio
