Page 146 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

That's the one clean gift of a night like this. Drunk tourists tip like they're trying to bribe their way into heaven.

The next pack rolls up to my station — four Alphas and one Omega, matching sunburns, obviously a bonded unit blowing through town on vacation. I read them in my four seconds flat: loud, loose, loaded, celebrating something they haven't told me yet. I take the Alphas' orders, a round of the local IPA and a bourbon neat, then turn to the Omega.

"And for you?"

"Could I just get a Shirley Temple?" she asks, a touch sheepish. "No alcohol. Extra cherries, if you're feeling generous?"

"You got it." I reach for the grenadine — and that is the exact moment her whole pack loses its collective mind.

"AShirley Temple?" The biggest of the four presses a hand flat to his chest like she's run him through. "Baby. I have not watched you order a Shirley Temple since…what, the fifth grade?"

"Back when we were all little bullying assholes," another one puts in, grinning ear to ear, "with no earthly clue you'd grow up to beours."

"Boys."

The Omega lifts one hand, and there's a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth that I catch a full beat before any of them do, because reading faces is the whole job.

"Do the math."

They blink at her. All four.

Blank as fresh snowfall.

"Why," she says, slow, savoring every second of it, "would an Omega not be drinking tonight?"

The silence that follows is a beautiful thing.

I count it out — one, two, three, four, five entire seconds of grown Alphas standing at my bar with their gears grindingvisibly, audibly — and then the big one makes a noise like a kettle hitting a hard boil.

"No." He grabs the edge of the mahogany with both hands. "Nofuckingway."

The Omega squeals, bouncing on her toes, and the big one's already trying to climb over my bar to get at her. But here's the part that snags me clean:only two of the four have caught up.

The other two are whipping their heads back and forth between everybody, going, "What? What is it? What'd we miss?" — the dumbest, most beloved men in the building.

An Omega two stools down, gathering her coat to leave, takes pity on them.

"She'spregnant,you gorgeous fools," she says, patting one of the confused ones on the cheek as she sweeps past. "Go on. Rejoice."

I brace for it.

Old habit, that bracing. Some part of me —the part raised watching one particular man treat his own family like a weight chained to his ankle— waits for one of these four to flinch.

To do the quiet, ugly math on money and freedom and everything a kid costs a man, and let it flicker across his face for even half a second.

Not one of them does.

The two slow ones catch up all at once, and the Driftglass erupts. They're on her —all four now— hauling her up off her stool, one of them actually lifting her clean off her feet and spinning her, careful even out of his mind with joy, the rest crowding in with their hands on her shoulders, her face, each other's necks, whooping loud enough to turn every head in the room.

She's laughing. She's crying.

She's radiant right there in the middle of them, the sun the four of them just decided, all at once, to spend the rest of their lives orbiting.

"Shirley Temples!" one of them bellows to the entire bar. "Shirley Temples for thehouse!We're having ababy!"

The whole place roars back.

Somebody down the bar starts a chant.