He laughs, startled and grateful, and the sound is so beautiful I want to tattoo it on my skin.
His hand slides up my spine, settling at the nape of my neck. For a second, his fingers tremble, as if he’s debating confession or retreat, but then he just kisses me, slow and steady, like he needs my mouth to ground him emotionally. I melt into him.
“Can I ask you something?” I murmur when we come up for air.
“Anything.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Support them? That’s what you meant when you said they’d lose everything without your money, right?”
He goes still beneath me. I can see his mind whirring, the arguments lining up in regimented rows behind his eyes, but he doesn’t reach for any of them. Instead, he lets his focus blur for a second, vulnerability leaking through in a way that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago. I wait. I’ve learned that with Logan, if I give him time, the truth comes out eventually.
“Habit, I guess?” He says it like he’s trying out the answer for size and finding it both too big and too small. “They always made it sound like it was my responsibility. The estate, the trusts, the philanthropy stuff—if I didn’t keep the gears moving, it all grinds down. Maybe I just… I don’t know how to stop. Or I’m afraid that if I do, the whole illusion collapses. And so does their opinion of me. Even though that opinion is basically negative infinity, anyway.”
He’s quiet, then, and I realize I can almost hear the exact ghost-echo of someone else’s voice behind the words—his mother’s, his father’s, some headmistress or hedge fund manager or therapist—pumping the same baseline into his subconscious until it played automatically. You must protect the name. You must not let the family fail. You must, you must.
I want to debug his childhood like corrupt code, find the broken line and rewrite it. But that’s not how people work.
So I stay still, chest pressed to his, breathing together. Sometimes understanding isn’t the fix. Sometimes presence is.
Eventually he rolls us so my back is on the mattress and his face is above mine, propped on his elbows. His eyes are dark, impossibly serious.
“You know the first time my parents ever seemed proud of me?” he says. “I was nine. They flew in this Nobel laureate—some family friend from Zurich—for dinner, and I recited all the digits of pi I’d memorized to the table, more than anyone expected. My mother teared up and my father called it ‘truly promising,’ and for the rest of the evening, they let me sit beside them while the adults talked. I thought,wow, this is it. I’d finally made it into their world. But…” He shakes his head. “The moment the dinner was over, I was shuttled off to my room, and I didn’t enter the same room as them until it was time to return to boarding school and the maid let them know we were leaving.”
My breath catches for him. Boarding school? At nine years old?
“They didn’t even act proud when I got accepted to MIT at fifteen. Just told me not to mess it up.” He laughs, sharp and soft. “It got worse after Harvard, after I started making real money. The more I succeeded, the more it proved they were right to send me away, to push for excellence. I became...” He shrugs. “Just one more asset to manage.”
I stroke his cheek, thumb brushing over the bone. He doesn’t flinch. He just looks at me, and it’s like he wants to climb inside my brain and live there, where it’s safe from all that.
“So when they asked to take me to dinner a few years ago and told me they were nearly bankrupt? When they said the estate was collapsing, and all the generations of legacy would disappear with it if I didn’t step in? Of course I did it. I thought... I thought this was finally the thing that would buy their respect. That I could fix the family and they’d have to see me as someone worthy of the Whitman name. I liquidated stock, leveragedeverything I’d built, and paid off their creditors in a single wire transfer. It totaled more money than the GDPs of some small countries. And when it was done, do you know what my father said?”
I swallow, the ache in my chest physical.
“Nothing. He just… slid a folder across the table, a two-page list of recurring monthly requirements—insurance, staff, utilities for the properties, donation schedules, retainer for the family attorney, the costs of hosting Caroline’s standing charity board luncheons—and the account numbers I needed to transfer the money into.
“He didn’t even look me in the eye as he did it. I think the not-looking was the only mercy he could offer. I scanned it right there out of reflex and realized: this wasn’t a conversation. It was a handoff of a job neither of them ever wanted. They expected the money to be available. No thank you. No concession. Just the implication that I’d be a disappointment—again—if anything bounced.
“That was the day I handed the whole thing over to Dominic to manage. I couldn’t stomach the idea of dealing with their constant demands—my mother calling to complain about the gardener’s salary, my father demanding increases to cover his club memberships. Dom handles all of it for me. He gives them a stipend, fields their requests, keeps them at arm’s length so I don’t have to deal with them directly.”
“That’s why your father made that comment at dinner. About Dominic being a ‘charity case.’”
“He hates that Dom has any power over their finances. He hates that I gave that power to someone he considers beneath him.” Logan’s expression darkens. “But he hates the alternative more. Without my money, they lose it all. The houses, the status, the lifestyle they’ve spent their whole lives pretending they deserve.”
I’m quiet for a moment, processing the weight of what he’s telling me. What I want is to reach through time—past, present, all the alternate realities branching off this house—and take his nine-year-old self into my arms. Tell him:you were always enough.Even when they made you small, even when they emptied you out and filled you with someone else’s ambitions, you werealwaysenough.
But I can’t fix what’s already happened. I can’t solve my way backward through thirty years of damage. And for someone who’s built her entire identity on understanding things well enough to fix them, that should feel like failure.
It doesn’t.
The closest I get is right now, this grown man above me, letting me see everything he’s never been allowed to say. And my god, if that’s not worth more than any wire transfer or inheritance or meaningless approval.
I tug him down and kiss him, urgent—the kind of kiss that means, ‘It doesn’t matter what they think. You’re not alone in it. Not ever again.’
His hand cradles my jaw, thumb painting a slow arc until I open for him. The helpless sound he makes into my mouth is everything—raw, grateful, unguarded. I want to make him feel it, the reckless faith I have in him. Not just in his mind but in his body, in every synapse, every cell.
