Page 18 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

The night air outside is sharp and cool, the Financial District quieter at this hour, the bay visible in the distance between buildings. I pull out my phone and request a car, and while I wait I let myself do what I hadn't allowed myself to do inside the venue — think about the evening without managing the thinking.

He is different outside the office. Not softer, not warmer exactly, but more dimensional — the way a person who exists in three dimensions looks different when you finally see them from another angle. In there he was still Logan Drake, still the gravitational center of every room he occupied, still the man whose standards have been reordering my professional life since the day I arrived. But there was something else visible tonight, something in the way he moved through that world that told me it wasn't just competence driving him. He genuinely belonged to it. And somehow, standing in that room beside him, I didn't feel like I didn't.

The car pulls up. I get in. I call Caleb on the ride back to the apartment. He picks up after four rings, and I can tell from the first syllable that he's tired — the particular flatness of someone at the end of a long shoot day who has used up everything they had on the work.

"Hey," he says. "How was the thing tonight?"

"Good. It was a good room. I held my own."

"Yeah? That's great." I hear something in the background — voices, or atelevision.

"How's the job going overall? Logan treating you okay?"

I think about how to answer this accurately and honestly and in a way that doesn't require more from this conversation than it currently has the capacity to give.

"It's intense," I say. "But I'm learning a lot."

"Good, good." A pause.

"He's not giving you a hard time, is he?"

"Nothing I can't handle."

"That's my girl." It's said warmly, automatically, in the specific way Caleb says things that are true in the way he means them and insufficient in every other way. "I've got an early call tomorrow — this new director is a six AM guy, which should be illegal. But let's talk this weekend?"

"Sure," I say. "This weekend."

We hang up and I look out the window at the city moving past, the particular nighttime architecture of San Francisco doing its thing — the hills, the lights, the fog beginning to settle over the bay in the distance. I'd wanted to tell him about Daniel, about holding the room, about the crisis I handled before anyone asked me to. I'd wanted to tell him that I think I might actually be good at this — not just competent but genuinely suited to this world in a way I didn't fully believe when I packed up my Los Angeles apartment a month ago.

I didn't tell him any of it. Not because he would have responded badly — he would have said something warm and moved on — but because I could already hear the moved on before I'd finished the sentence. And there's something specific aboutchoosing not to share something with the person you're supposed to share things with that tells you more than the sharing itself would have.

The car pulls up to the building. I get out and stand on the sidewalk for a moment before going in, the city spread out around me in every direction, the air carrying the particular San Francisco quality of salt and fog and something that might just be altitude.

I'm not sad. That's the honest accounting of it. I'm not sad and I'm not particularly lonely and I'm not questioning anything I've built in the past month. I'm just — aware. Of the specific shape of a life that is becoming something, and the question of whether the people who were part of the life before are going to be part of the life it's becoming.

It's not a question I'm ready to answer tonight. I go inside and let the door close behind me.

Chapter Six

Logan

I've increased her workload twice in the past month.

I haven't examined why. The first increase came at the end of her second week, when I added the vendor correspondence management to her queue on the basis that Rachel had handled it and Sutton's organizational instincts were clearly sufficient to absorb it without disruption. The second came a week after that — the client briefing summaries, which require not just organizational competence but a functional understanding of the business relationships they document.

Most assistants at her tenure would have needed another month before I'd have considered handing them that responsibility. I handed it to her at the three-week mark because she was ready, and I knew she was ready because I'd been paying closer attention than the role requires. That observation sits at the edge of my awareness and I move on.

What I will acknowledge — because I'm a man whodeals in facts and the facts are the facts — is that she is exceptional at this job. Not in the way that competent people are exceptional, where the bar is low enough that meeting it reads as distinction. In the way that genuinely capable people are exceptional, where the bar keeps moving and they keep clearing it without apparent strain.

She's learned the briefing note shorthand in less than two weeks. She anticipates correspondence needs before I've identified them myself. She manages the operational architecture of my office with a precision that is, by any objective measure, better than what I had before.

She also asks exactly one clarifying question per task — never more, never the kind that signals she hasn't thought the problem through herself. She asks the question that actually needs answering and then she goes and does the work. I've had directors on my floor who lack that discipline.

None of this is relevant in any context other than the professional one. I note it the way I note any operational data point — accurately and without sentiment.

What is harder to move past, and what I've spent the better part of a month declining to examine directly, is the other category of things I've noticed; the way she moves through the corridor between our spaces — unhurried, purposeful, with the specific self-possession of someone who has decided to belong somewhere and acted on that decision. The particular quality of her focus when she's working through something difficult, the slight forward angle of her posture, the way shetucks one strand of blonde hair back without looking up from the screen.

The fact that I know what she sounds like when she's on a vendor call versus a client call versus a call she's not entirely comfortable with, because the register of her voice shifts in ways I've cataloged without deciding to catalog them. These are not operational data points. I'm aware of that. I move forward anyway.