Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~4 min read
Chapter 21: On Pause
She suggested it on a Sunday, which in retrospect she recognized as the worst possible day for it.
Sunday was their day — pancakes, blueberries if they had them, the slow morning ritual that had become the axis of the week. Emma had eaten and gone to the backyard and was conducting some kind of survey of the rocks she’d been cataloguing for weeks, which left Maya and Jackson at the kitchen table with the Sunday quiet and the coffee and the thing Maya had been turning over since Friday’s call with Patricia.
“I want to pause,” she said.
He looked up from his cup.
“The — us part. Of this.” She held her own cup and looked at the table. “Patricia called Friday. She ran the scenario several ways. Having an active romantic relationship with an MC member, living in his house, she thinks it gives Derek’s lawyer too much to work with. She wants us to be — co-habitants. Practically speaking.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“Co-habitants,” Jackson said.
“Publicly. For the case.” She looked up. “It’s just three weeks. It’s just about what the court sees, what Derek’s lawyer can argue. If we’re — if there’s no relationship to point to, then the argument that I’ve exposed Emma to a dangerous lifestyle through a romantic attachment —” She stopped. “It falls apart.”
He looked at her steadily. She could see him processing it, every line of his face careful and contained.
“You want to pretend we’re not together,” he said.
“Not pretend. Just — pause.” She heard how thin that distinction sounded and pressed on. “We’re still here. We’re still living here. Nothing changes for Emma. But we stop — the outward parts. Just for three weeks. Until after the hearing.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“Is this what you want?” he asked. “Or is it what Patricia wants?”
“It’s what I think gives Emma the best chance,” she said.
He looked at her. “That’s not what I asked.”
She looked back at him. At the steadiness and the thing underneath it, the thing that was present and careful and waiting.
“No,” she said honestly. “It’s not what I want.”
He nodded once. Just once, and the nod carried something — acceptance, and cost.
“Okay,” he said.
She felt the word land. “Okay?”
“You need to win this case. I know that.” He picked up his coffee. Set it down without drinking. “I can do three weeks.”
She looked at him and felt the particular ache of the right decision being hard, of choosing correctly and having it cost you.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be.” He looked out the kitchen window at the backyard, where Emma was labeling rocks with a seriousness of purpose. “She’s worth it.”
Maya followed his gaze. Emma had set Rosie on a particularly large rock, apparently as an overseer.
“She’s worth it,” Maya agreed.
They sat in the Sunday quiet and drank their coffee and didn’t touch each other, and it was the first Sunday morning in three weeks that felt wrong, and that feeling — the specific, clear-edged wrongness of it — was something Maya filed away.
It told her something true about where she was. About what she’d built here without fully noticing.
She was in love with him.
She’d known it for a while, in the way you know things you’re not ready to say, keeping the knowledge in a room with the door closed. It was there now, in the Sunday morning, while he looked at her daughter through the kitchen window and said she’s worth it without any calculation in his voice at all.
She was absolutely in love with him.
Three weeks. She could keep that door closed for three weeks.
She went back to her coffee and thought: three weeks, and then I’m going to tell him.
She had no idea how terrifying and how simple that was going to be.
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