Chapter 5: A Taste of Trouble

The afternoon sun, usually a cheerful splash of gold across Harper’s worn living room, felt more like a spotlight on her mounting anxieties. Remi, her seven-year-old sprite with hair like spun sugar and eyes the color of a summer sky, was supposed to be enjoying a quiet cookie-and-Sean cuddle session on the rug. Gunner, her four-year-old whirlwind of blonde energy, was meant to be contained within the designated “fort zone” of sofa cushions. Instead, the air vibrated with the unmistakable soundtrack of impending disaster: high-pitched shrieks, the frantic scrabbling of tiny hands, and the bewildered whines of their golden retriever, Sean.

Harper’s stomach lurched. She’d been mentally cataloging Wilder’s more infuriating habits – the way he left his designer shirts draped on furniture like an offering to the laundry gods, his infuriating habit of correcting her grammar with a smirk that could curdle milk, his uncanny ability to predict her next move, and then, infuriatingly, do the opposite. Her list was long, and honestly, it was her primary entertainment. But today, her mental ledger of Wilder’s offenses was rudely interrupted by the primal scream of her children in distress.

“What in the actual hell?” she muttered, abandoning her half-hearted attempt to fold laundry. Harper, a woman who operated on a perpetual state of ‘zero chill,’ was already on her feet, her smoky eyes scanning the room for the source of the eruption.