Page 29 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"Eight months building toward that credit and they went with someone else at the last minute." Another beat.

"I've been trying to talk to you about it. But you're never available."

"I understand you're frustrated about Meridian." I keep my voice even.

"And I do want to hear about it. But I haven't been unreachable because I don't care — I've been managing a genuine crisis at work. Late nights, long days, a team depending on me to keep things running. My work matters too, Caleb."

The silence that follows is a specific kind. Not the silence of someone processing what you've said. The silence of someone who has already decided what comes next and is just finding the moment to say it.

"I know it does," he says. Then: "I just don't think this is working."

I go still on the sidewalk. The street keeps moving around me — a couple passing, a cab, someone on a bike. The world entirely indifferent.

"What?"

"Us," he says. Quietly. Cleanly.

"I don't think it's working. The distance, the timing —it was already a lot before you moved. Now it's just — we're not really in each other's lives anymore."

There's something almost rehearsed about it. Not cruel — Caleb isn't cruel. He's something more specific. Finished. He sounds like a man who arrived at this conclusion a while ago and has been waiting for the right window. He found it here, on a Thursday afternoon, while I'm standing outside a café in the cold.

"You're ending this," I say. Not a question.

"I think it's the right call. For both of us."

The anger comes fast and hot. Not the devastated kind — not the kind with tears underneath it. The kind that comes from being managed. From being someone else's tidy resolution. From watching a person look at something real and decide it's a loose end.

"That's very clean, Caleb," I say. My voice is level. I'm proud of that.

"Very efficient."

"Sutton—"

"I hope the next project goes better," I say, and I hang up.

I stand on the sidewalk for a full minute. Maybe longer. The café door opens beside me and someone calls my name — the order is ready. I go inside. I pick it up. I tip generously because the woman behind the counter has had nothing to do with any of this. I walk the three blocks back to the office with the bags in my hand and the wind in my face and something locked very tightly in my chest.

I am not devastated.

That's the part that undoes me. Standing in the elevator on the way back up, watching the floor numbers rise, I take an honest accounting. I find anger. I find indignation. I find the sharp sting of being dismissed. What I don't find — no matter how far down I look — is heartbreak. And the absence of it asks a question I'm not ready to answer out loud.

The elevator opens. I go to the kitchen and set out the lunch order. I send a quick message to the conference room that it's ready. Then I walk to the women's bathroom on the far end of the floor and lock the door behind me. I stand at the sink with the cold water running over my wrists.

I breathe. Thirty seconds. A full minute. I look at myself in the mirror. I look exactly the same as I did this morning, which seems like it should be wrong somehow.

Logan is at a client lunch. The conference room team is eating. Nobody needs anything from me for the next twenty minutes. I turn off the water and I dry my hands. I go back to my desk and I work.

He's back by 2:30. I hear him before I see him — his footstep in the corridor, the specific way the space reorganizes when he enters it. I'm at my screen. I don't look up. He pauses briefly in the corridor the way he sometimes does, taking stock before moving forward. Then he goes into his office and the afternoon resumes.

The conference room team reconvenes at 3:00. The afternoon is brutal in the way only the third week of a sustained crisis can be. Everything takes longer than it should. The pressure compounds. Solutions reveal newcomplications as fast as the old ones get resolved. I'm running on very little and holding it together through sheer discipline. Today is not the day. This is not the place.

By 9:45 the conference room team has packed up. Logan released them an hour ago — go home, we pick this up tomorrow. The floor has gone quiet around us. We are the only two left.

I'm at my desk finishing the updated spreadsheet — the client's revised timeline mapped against the integration phases, every dependency flagged, every risk annotated. It's thorough. It's correct. I want it on his desk so I can get my coat and go home. I save it. I print it and then I pick up the papers and walk into his office.

He's at his desk with his jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, tie loosened — the specific state of a man at the end of a day that has taken everything. He looks up when I come in.

"The revised timeline," I say. I set it on the desk in front of him.