Page 101 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"You're happy," she says. Not a question.

"I'm very happy," I say.

"It's still a little surprising."

"It shouldn't be," she says.

"You built this. You chose it."

She reaches and picks up her glass.

"It should not be surprising at all."

We clink glasses. Inside I can hear Logan's voice — he's on a call, the low cadence of it carrying through the open kitchen window. Maggie and I sit in the sun and talk about her work and her new apartment and the man she's been seeing for three months who she refuses to define yet, and the afternoon moves around us easy and warm.

Caleb sent a card when we got married. It was handwritten, brief. Congratulations and genuine best wishes, nothing performative in it. Logan told me about it the evening it arrived — he'd read it, set it on the counter, and stood there for a moment before he said anything. What he said was: "He's trying."

"I know," I said.

"That's enough for now," he said.

It was. It is. The wound between the brothers hasn't closed completely and I don't expect it to — not quickly, not without time and effort from both sides. But it isn't infected anymore. It's just healing, the way things heal when people decide to let them.

Logan called Caleb on his birthday in October. Fifteen minutes. I don't know exactly what was said because I gave him the privacy of it, but when he came back to the kitchen his jaw was less tight than it had been when he picked up the phone. He poured himself a drink and he said, "He's doing well. New project. Sounds like it's going somewhere."

"Good," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "Good."

That was all. But it was something. It was the beginning of something, which is more than either of them had for the past decade.

***

I find out on a Wednesday. I take the test at 7:00 in the morning before Logan is up, standing in our bathroom with the kind of focused calm that arrives when something important is happening and panic would be useless. I wait the required time. I look at the result. I stand there for a moment with the test in my hand and I take one full breath in and let it out slowly. Then I smile.

After I confirm the results officiallywith my doctor, I carry it for three days. Not out of fear — out of the desire to find the right moment. To give this the space it deserves. Logan and I have built a life together that I love completely and what I'm holding is the thing that makes it larger and I want to hand it to him correctly.

Saturday morning. The garden. The rosemary and the late afternoon light and the table from the estate sale in Marin. He's outside this time without being asked — he does this now, comes to find me when the work is finished rather than staying at his desk until I come to find him. He has a glass of water and he sits across from me and he looks at the garden the way he's started looking at it — like something he's beginning to appreciate.

"You planted something new," he says.

He nods toward the far corner of the fence.

"Lavender," I say. "It'll come back every year."

"Practical," he says.

"I thought you'd appreciate that."

He looks at me.

"I appreciate most things you do."

I look at him across the table. The afternoon light is doing something to his face — the salt and pepper streaks in his hair, the lines at the corners of his eyes that I've cataloged completely now, the jaw that has become as familiar to me as my own hands.

He is watching me with the full attention he gives things that matter and I understand that he already knows something is different. He reads me too well.

"I have something to tell you," I say.