Page 23 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

I change the subject because the alternative is sitting inside a question I'm not ready to answer, and Maggie lets me because she's perceptive enough to know that some things land better when they're given room to settle on their own.

But later, in my room, getting ready for bed, the question finds me anyway. Not the one about Caleb — the simpler one, the one that's been there since I walked out of that office tonight. I said yes immediately. Before I'd thought it through. Before I'd weighed the complications against the opportunity. I said yes the way you say yes to something when part of you has already been waiting for the question. I don't examine that too closely. I turn off the light and let the city do the rest.

***

The first briefing is on a Tuesday.

Logan has the donor list pulled up on the conferenceroom screen when I arrive — forty-seven names, each with a profile that covers their philanthropic history, their relationship to the Drake Foundation, their professional background, and in several cases a specific note about what they care about most and what they don't respond well to. It is, I think as I sit down and open my notebook, the most thorough preparation I've ever seen anyone do for a social event.

"We'll go through the tier-one donors first," he says, standing at the head of the table. He doesn't sit for these — he moves, pacing slightly, the way he does when he's working through something that requires all of him.

"These are the relationships that matter most to the foundation's ongoing funding structure. You need to know their names, their connection to the foundation, and at least one specific thing about each of them before we walk into that room."

"Understood." I'm already making notes.

He moves through the list with the precision of someone who has done this type of preparation his entire professional life — specific, efficient, never more information than what's actually useful. I ask questions when I need to and don't when I don't, and somewhere in the second hour of it I notice that we've shifted from him presenting to the two of us working through the material together, trading observations, cross-referencing what I've absorbed about the business over the past month against the social landscape he's mapping. He corrects me twice. Both corrections are right.

At one point we both reach for the printed donorprofile on the table at the same time — my hand landing a half-second before his, close enough that when he reaches I feel the air move before his fingers stop an inch from mine.

He pulls back. Picks up a different document. Doesn't acknowledge it.

I write something in my notebook that has nothing to do with donor profiles.

The second briefing is two days later — the foundation board dynamics, the political undercurrents of the room, who is friendly with whom and who isn't and why it matters. Logan is thorough in a way that makes me understand, more clearly than I have before, how much of his success is preparation rather than instinct. Or rather — how he's turned preparation into instinct, so that by the time he walks into any room he's already several moves ahead of everyone else in it.

Watching him work like this — focused, exacting, the full force of his attention on something — does something to the room. Or maybe to me. I'm not sure the distinction matters.

There's a moment near the end of the second briefing where he's standing at the window, reviewing something on his tablet, and he reads something that requires him to think for a moment. He goes still in the specific way he does when he's processing — completely motionless, looking at nothing, his mind somewhere else entirely. The late afternoon light is doing something to the angles of his face that I'm aware of noticing and immediately decide not to think aboutfurther.

He comes back to himself, turns from the window, and catches me looking.

Neither of us says anything. He moves to the next item on the briefing document. I look back at my notes.

Neither of us acknowledges it. But the temperature in the room has changed and we both feel it, and the professionalism we're both holding onto is working considerably harder than it was an hour ago.

I text Caleb that evening — something brief, easy, the kind of message that carries just enough information without requiring a full conversation.

Sutton: Heading to Dallas next week for a work trip. Foundation gala with the firm. Should be back by Sunday.

His reply comes forty minutes later, while I'm in the middle of making dinner with Maggie.

Caleb: Sounds good. Travel safe. Call me when you're back.

Maggie glances at my phone screen from across the kitchen island. She doesn't say anything. She hands me the salt and turns back to the stove. I put the phone face down and pick up where I left off.

The car arrives at 6:15 Thursday morning. I'm outside the building when it pulls up, bag at my feet, coffee in hand, the city still doing its early-morning thing — quiet in the way San Francisco gets before the fog burns off, the light soft and gray and not yet committed to the day. I've been awakesince five, which is earlier than necessary and which I'm not going to examine.

Logan is already in the car. He's in a dark suit, no tie yet, the top button of his shirt open in the specific way of a man who will have everything perfectly assembled by the time he arrives wherever he's going but allows himself the concession of not being fully buttoned before he gets there. He glances up from his phone when I get in — a look that takes me in from head to toe with the unhurried directness he's never bothered to hide — and then his attention goes back to his phone.

"Morning," I say.

"Morning." He doesn't look up again.

The car pulls away from the curb. I look out my window at the city waking up around us and I drink my coffee and I don't fill the silence with anything because I've learned that silence with Logan is not the same thing as absence. He's always thinking. The quiet just means he's doing it without an audience.

The airport is efficient — private terminal, no lines, the specific frictionless experience of traveling at his level that I've started to think of as simply how this works and which I know I should probably not get used to. We board first class side by side. The seats are wide enough that there is real distance between us and I'm aware of it the way you're aware of a distance that is deliberate.

He opens his laptop. I open my notes from the second briefing and go back through the board dynamics we covered, running the names and the relationships in my head the way I'd prepare for any important meeting.