Page 11 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"I need to be up there within two weeks," I tell him.

"Their current assistant is transitioning out and they need someone in place before she's gone."

"Two weeks," he repeats. A pause that lasts just long enough to be noticeable.

"We can make the distance work. It's not that different from now, really."

He says it easily, which is the thing about Caleb — he says difficult things easily, not because he's careless but because he genuinely doesn't register their weight. The distance isn't that different from now. As if now is a standard worth maintaining. As if the geography is the only variable worth naming.

"Right," I say. "I'll keep you posted on the timeline."

"Sounds good. Hey, I've got to get back — they're calling me. But congrats, Sutton. Seriously. You're going to crush it up there."

He hangs up and I look at my phone for a moment after the call ends. The congratulations were genuine. That's the thing about Caleb that makes simple conclusions about him feel insufficient — he means well, in the specific way that people mean well when meaning well has never required them to inconvenience themselves. I put the phone down and call Patricia back twelve minutes before the Friday deadline. Then I call Maggie.

Margaret Ellis — Maggie, always Maggie, never Margaret except on legal documents and in the memory of every Northwestern professor who ever tried to take attendance — answers on the second ring with the particular energy of someone who has been waiting for news and is trying not to show it.

"Tell me," she says, without preamble.

"I took the job."

The sound she makes is immediate and entirely unself-conscious — a sharp, delighted noise that I know has turned heads in whatever open-plan accounting office she's currently sitting in, because Maggie has never once successfully contained a reaction in her professional life and has built an extraordinarily successful career in spite of it.

We met the first week of freshman year at Northwestern, assigned to the same floor of the same dormitory with the same bewildered expression that everyone wears when they've left somewhere familiar for somewhere enormous. Maggie was from Newport Beach — sun-blonde and quick-witted and immediately, overwhelmingly sure of herself in the way that girls from Southern California sometimes are, the confidence baked in by geography. I was from Cleveland, which is a different kind of formation entirely, and the contrast was precisely why we worked.

We pledged the same sorority sophomore year. We studied for finals in the same library carrel for four consecutive semesters. We've kept each other informed about every major life development since graduation with the specific consistency of people who understand that some friendships are structural — they hold the whole thing up.

Maggie has been in San Francisco for three years, working for one of the city's premier accounting firms with the methodical brilliance that made her the person everyone else in our sorority chapter copied their problem sets from. She has a two-bedroomapartment in Pacific Heights that she's been telling me to come fill since the day she moved in.

"I have been waiting for this phone call for two years," she says, when she's collected herself enough to form a sentence.

"When do you get here? What do you need? Do you need help with the move?"

"I need a room," I tell her.

"And I need it fast — I have two weeks. Their current assistant is on her way out and they need me in place before she's gone."

"Two weeks." I can hear her already shifting into logistics mode, the accountant's brain that catalogs and sequences everything clicking into gear.

"Okay. The room will be ready by the weekend. I've been using it as a second closet but that is absolutely a me problem that I will handle today."

"I appreciate that."

"Don't appreciate it, just get here." A pause.

"Tell me about the job. Drake Industries is serious, Sutton. That's a real company. Logan Drake is—" She stops.

"Is what?"

"I mean, I don't know him personally, obviously. But he has a reputation. He runs a tight ship. People who work there either love it or they don't last, from what I hear. He's very — exacting, I think is the diplomatic word."

"I've gathered that from the press coverage."

"You'll be fine," Maggiesays, and she means it the way she always means things — completely, without qualification.

"You're the most capable person I know and I've known a lot of capable people. Just — go in prepared."

"When have I ever not been prepared?"