Page 100 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

I'm a Director of Portfolio Strategy at Clara Reeves' firm now. The promotion came six months ago — Clara called me into her office on a Tuesday afternoon, slid a folder across the desk, and told me the role was mine if I wanted it. I told her I wanted it. She told me she knew. That was the entire conversation. It was the most efficient and satisfying professional moment of my career.

The role is demanding in the way I like demanding — not chaotic, not reactive, but the sustained pressure of work that requires everything I have on a consistent basis. I manage a team of four analysts. I sit on two portfolio review boards. Last month I led a presentation to a group of institutional investors that Clara told me afterward was the best she'd seen from anyone at my level.

I told Logan that evening I got the news, over dinner. He looked at me across the table and said,

"I know. Clara texted me."

I stared at him. "Clara texted you?"

"She wanted me to know." He picked up his fork.

"I think she was pleased with herself for hiring you away from me."

"She should be," I said.

"She should be," he agreed.

No hesitation. No qualifier. Just that — clean, direct, true. I'm still not entirely used to being with a man who means it every time.

***

Maggie comes for lunch on the last Saturday of themonth. She moved to a new apartment in Noe Valley after I left Pacific Heights. She shows up with flowers from the farmers market and a bottle of something good and the specific energy of a woman who has had an excellent week and intends to share it.

We sit in the garden — the part I've actually finished, the corner with the table and the overgrown rosemary that was here when we moved in and that I've decided to keep. The afternoon is warm. Logan is somewhere inside, working, which Maggie has come to understand and accept as simply part of his natural habitat on weekends.

"He came outside earlier," I tell her.

"Voluntarily. He sat in that chair for twenty minutes."

Maggie looks at the chair in question.

"Doing what?"

"Reading," I say. "Not his tablet. An actual book."

She raises her eyebrows.

"Marriage really does change a man."

"Don't tell him that," I say.

"He'll deny it."

She laughs. She pulls her sunglasses down from the top of her head.

"How are the in-laws?"

"Good. They came for dinner two weeks ago. Deborah has decided she and I have a standing book club, which I did not agree to but apparently agreed to." I shake my head.

"She texted me a reading list."

"I love her,"Maggie says.

"She'd love you, if you were able to spend more time together," I say.

"She loves everyone who can hold a real conversation, which eliminates about sixty percent of the people in her social circle."

Maggie smiles. She looks around the garden — the rosemary, the new plantings along the fence, the table we found at an estate sale in Marin that Logan carried to the car himself without complaint. Her expression is warm and settled.