Page 28 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

Monday morning I'm at my desk by 7:55. When Logan walks in at eight our eyes meet briefly across the corridor. I give him the same professional nod I always give him. He gives me the same contained acknowledgment he always gives me. We both turn back to our screens. We are both very good at this.

The crisis surfaces on a Tuesday..

I'm coordinating three correspondence threads when Keith stops by the corridor with the look he gets when something is wrong enough to matter but not wrong enough to panic. He and Logan exchange a few words atthe office doorway. Logan's expression doesn't change — it never does. But something in his posture sharpens, and within twenty minutes the day has reorganized itself entirely.

A systems integration for one of Drake Industries' major enterprise clients. Complications that surfaced late and badly, the kind with a cascading effect on timelines and contracts and relationships built over years. Logan pulls a small team together — four people from development and client relations. By early afternoon we're in the smaller conference room on the north side of the floor with laptops open and the understanding that nobody is going home at 5:00.

Nobody goes home at 5:00 for the rest of the week…

I become the operational center of gravity for everything outside the technical problem itself. Dinner orders when it hits seven and people are still at the table. Presentation decks updated as the strategy evolves. Timeline analysis. Client communication threads. I'm good at this — the clarity that comes with a real problem, a room full of people who need things, the satisfaction of making sure nothing falls through. I was made for this kind of pressure.

What I wasn't fully prepared for is how much of it puts me in close range of Logan. We're in and out of the same conference room for hours at a stretch. I'm at his shoulder reviewing the revised integration timeline, close enough to catch the clean, masculine scentof him — something understated, just warmth and something faintly cedar — before I redirect my attention back to the document. When he's at the whiteboard walking the team through the adjusted rollout strategy, I watch him think. I watch him move. I understand for the first time with complete clarity that I am in serious trouble.

He gives me more eye contact than he used to. I notice it the way you notice a change in light — not dramatic, just different. A held gaze a beat longer than before. Eyes finding mine across the conference table when a point lands. A look in the corridor that doesn't have a professional explanation and doesn't reach for one. He's not performing anything. It's just there. Then it isn't. We both move forward.

I do this every day for a week and a half. The late nights blur together. Home at 10:00 one evening, 10:30 on another, and once at nearly 11:00. Maggie leaves a plate covered in foil on the counter because she is Maggie and that is what she does. I fall asleep fast and wake up already thinking about the client timeline before the day has started.

Caleb and I have not spoken. Not really. A handful of texts across the week — his saying he caught my voicemail, mine saying I've been buried, his saying no worries. We are orbiting each other from a distance and I tell myself it's circumstance. The time zones, the hours, the pace of the project. I believe this mostly — except for the moments at eleven at night in the back of a car going home when the silence is honest in a way I can't argue with.

***

It's a Thursday—almost two weeks out from Dallas. I'm picking up a working lunch order for the team — a place three blocks from the office. It's cold out, properly cold, the wind off the bay sharp and opinionated. I'm standing on the sidewalk outside the café when my phone rings.

Caleb.

I stare at it for one ring. We haven't actually spoken in over a week. I pick up.

"Hey," I say. "I was going to call you tonight."

"Yeah." His voice is flat. Not tired — compressed. Like someone who has been in a bad mood long enough that it has become his default setting.

"I figured I'd just call."

"Is everything okay?"

"Not particularly." A beat.

"I've been trying to reach you."

"I know — I'm sorry. This project at work has been completely consuming. The whole team has been—"

"Sutton." He says my name with the specific impatience of someone who has already decided they don't want the explanation.

"I called three times last week. Every time it went to voicemail."

"I was in briefings. I texted you that. We've been working until—"

"I really don't need your schedule brokendown for me," he says. The edge is fully present now, no longer underneath anything.

I stop. Take a breath. The wind cuts down the street.

"What's going on with you, Caleb?"

A pause. "The Meridian project fell through."

"I'm sorry—"

"Eight months," he says.