Page 27 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"There's someone I need you to meet," I say.

I watch her reassemble herself in real time — smooth, practiced, nothing showing. I do the same. We go back through the glass doors into the warmth of the ballroom and I don't put my hand on her back this time. The distance I keep between us for the rest of the evening is deliberate, and we both know it. We don't go back to the terrace.

In the car on the way back, I run through the evening's outcomes — two donor follow-ups, the Nakamura contact to pursue, Margaret Caldwell requiring a personal note from the foundation within the week. She has a notepad this time and has drafted the follow-up structure before we pull up to the hotel. Clean, efficient, exactly right.

Now we're at the point where the corridor meets both our doors and the evening has run out of agenda.

"The Nakamura follow-up," she says.

"He's going to move fast on the AI division conversation."

"I know," I say. "I'll handle it when we're back."

"The Caldwell note — do you want me to draft that tonight?"

"Tomorrow is fine," I say.

She nods. A beat of quiet.

"It went well," she says.

"It did," I agree.

She looks at me for a moment — something sitting just behind her eyes that she decides to keep there. Then she says, "Good night, Logan," and turns toward her door.

I watch her find the keycard in her clutch. The door opens. She steps inside without looking back. I don't move until her door closes. Then I go into my room.

The suite is exactly as I left it. The city beyond the windows is doing what Dallas does at midnight — alive, spread wide, unapologetically lit. I pour two fingers of scotch from the bar and don't sit down. I stand at the window the way I stand when I need to think without the room organizing itself around me.

She saidpeople aren't investment portfoliosand she was right, which is the problem. I know she was right. I know it in the specific waythat a truth lands when it finds something you've been successfully ignoring and refuses to be ignored any longer.

I test people because I don't trust what I can't verify. That is a system I built over ten years and it has served me without exception. It has also, I understand in this room at midnight with a glass I'm barely touching, never once produced anything that felt like what I felt on that terrace tonight.

She looked at me like she could see past the whole architecture of it — the control, the distance, the wall I've been maintaining so long it stopped feeling like a wall and started feeling like just how I am. She looked at me like she saw something behind it and wasn't afraid of what she found.

I think about Giselle. Not with the old familiar weight of it, but from a distance — the specific distance of time. Giselle was lonely. I was absent. We turned each other into something neither of us intended and we both paid for it in different ways. I swore off this — not love specifically, but the particular vulnerability of wanting someone close enough to see you. The cost of that had been too high.

That was the logic. Standing here tonight it sounds like what it is — a ten-year-old decision I've been applying to every room I've walked into since, including the ones it no longer fits.

Caleb.

I say the name in my head with the flatness of someone applying a remedy they know works. He is my brother. She is his girlfriend. That is the architecture ofthis situation and it does not change because I had a moment on a terrace in Dallas that I should have ended thirty seconds sooner.

I finish the scotch and set the glass down. The adjoining door is across the room. I don't look at it. I go to bed.

Chapter Nine

Sutton

Ispend Sunday night unpacking slowly. Not because I have much to unpack — I was only gone two nights. Moving through the ordinary motions of it gives my hands something to do while my head does what it's been doing since the plane touched down.

Going over it all; the terrace. The way he stepped toward me. The one second his eyes dropped and the city glittered below us and everything contracted into that single moment before the door opened and he walked away. I hang the emerald gown in the back of the closet. I don't look at it anymore.

Maggie's out — a friend's birthday dinner, home late. Which is fine. I'm not ready to talk about Dallas yet. Maggie has an uncanny ability to extract things I haven't decided to share just by looking at me for too long. I need one night to put everything in the right place before I let anyone near it.

I make tea I don't drink. I sit at the kitchen counter.I'm honest with myself for exactly as long as I can stand it. Something shifted in Dallas. Not in a way I manufactured or imagined — in a way that was real and mutual and witnessed by both of us and then deliberately walked back. He walked it back. I watched him do it, smooth and efficient, the mask back in place before we'd crossed through the terrace doors. I did the same because the room required it. Because that's what you do when you're performing a role that has started to feel uncomfortably close to not a performance.

What I won't do is sit here on a Sunday night and pretend I don't know what I felt when he stepped toward me. What I also won't do is follow that thought anywhere further. He is my boss. Caleb is his brother. Wanting something and being allowed to have it are two different things, and I've never confused them. I pour the tea down the sink and go to bed.