Page 16 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

Sutton

One month in and I've stopped being surprised by him.

That's not the same as beingusedto him — I'm not sure that's a threshold anyone reaches with Logan Drake. It's more that I've recalibrated my baseline. The first week I came home every evening with the specific depletion of someone who has been operating at maximum output for ten hours straight and has nothing left to show for it except the knowledge that tomorrow he'll expect more.

By the second week I stopped waiting for acknowledgment that didn't come and started measuring my performance against my own standards instead of his reaction to them. By the third week I understood that his reaction — or the absence of it — was itself a form of information, and I got better at reading it.

He communicates in corrections. Not compliments, not encouragement, not the ordinary professional courtesiesthat most workplaces run on. If he marks something up, it means it needs work. If he doesn't mark it up, it means it met the threshold. That's the full vocabulary of his feedback and it took me two weeks to stop interpreting the silence as indifference and start interpreting it correctly — as the closest thing to approval his professional manner produces.

His standards are not unreasonable. They are simply unsparing. There's a difference, and recognizing that fact is what's kept me from walking out on three separate occasions when a lesser version of myself might have.

The mornings set the tone for everything. He arrives before eight without exception, and by the time I get to my desk at 7:55 the correspondence he's flagged overnight is already waiting in my queue — prioritized, notated, each item with a specific expected turnaround that is never generous and always achievable if I work without interruption. I've learned not to interrupt myself. I've learned to anticipate what he needs before he asks for it, which is partly intuition and partly the meticulous study of a man who is, whatever else he is, entirely consistent.

Logan Drake does not change his mind arbitrarily. He does not move the target. He sets an expectation and he holds it, which means if I can map the expectation clearly enough I can meet it — and I have, with a reliability that I know he's registered even if he's never said so directly.

What he doesn't do is warm up. Not to me, not to the day, not to the ordinary social lubrication that mostprofessionals apply to their working relationships without thinking about it. He doesn't ask how my morning was. He doesn't make small talk in the corridor or the elevator. He says what needs to be said, expects what needs to be expected, and operates inside a professional remove so consistent it has the quality of architecture — structural, load-bearing, built to last.

I find it maddening and I find it clarifying in equal measure, which is not a combination I anticipated.

Maggie gets the debrief every evening over whatever she's cooking or whatever takeout she's ordered, because Maggie has decided that my re-entry into the apartment is an event that requires food and her full attention, which I've stopped arguing with because arguing with Maggie about things she's already decided is an exercise in creative futility.

"He said nothing again?" she asks one Thursday, sliding a bowl across the counter without looking up from her phone.

"He returned the Nakamura brief without a single mark on it."

She looks up. "And that's good?"

"That's very good."

She considers this with the expression of someone trying to understand the rules of a game she didn't agree to play.

"So the goal is to produce work that a man who communicates exclusively in red ink doesn't mark up."

"Correct."

"That soundsexhausting."

"It is," I tell her.

"It's also the most engaged I've been professionally in years, so."

Maggie sets her phone down entirely, which means I have her full attention, which means a question is coming that I'm not going to enjoy.

"Why do you keep going back if he's that impossible?"

I have the answer ready because I've been asking myself the same thing.

"Because the exposure is real. The access to this industry at this level — I couldn't get this anywhere else. In six months I'll know more about enterprise tech and how a company like Drake Industries operates than I would in three years somewhere else." I eat a bite of whatever she's made.

"It's the career opportunity. That's why."

Maggie picks up her phone again, which means she's accepted the answer without fully believing it. She doesn't push. But the question sits in the room after she's moved on from it, and I'm aware of it the way you're aware of something you've put in a drawer rather than dealt with.

It happens on a Wednesday..

I'm at my desk when I hear it — the sharp, controlled cadence of Logan's voice through the partially open door of his office shifting into something that doesn't match his usual register. I don't mean raised. Logan Drake doesn't raise his voice. But there's a quality to it that I've learned to distinguish from his ordinary command tone, a compression that meanssomething has gone wrong that wasn't supposed to go wrong.

I pull up the Drake Industries server infrastructure dashboard on my secondary monitor — something I started doing early on as a way of tracking the operational context behind the correspondence I manage — and I see it before anyone's told me about it. A cascade failure in the Portland node. The same vulnerability that had been flagged for resolution. It hasn't been fully addressed and now it's active, and based on what I'm reading it's going to take down the secondary failover for two enterprise clients in the next twenty minutes if someone doesn't reroute the load manually.