Page 3 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

She turns her head. Her eyes move to my hand, then to my face, and what crosses her expression is not surprise. It's something quieter and more dangerous — recognition. Readiness. She watches me the way she watched me all evening, like whatever comes next is something she has already decided she wants.

All of these months of maintaining every distance I constructed between us. Every charged moment recalibrated. Every reason I rehearsed for why she needed to stay on the other side of a very deliberate line—she was a complication I couldn't afford.

She reaches out and wraps her hand over mine — not replacing it, just covering it, her fingers warm at my wrist. She looks at me with those blue eyes that have lived inside my chest since the morning she walked through my office door, and she says nothing at all. She doesn't have to.

"Come here," I say.

Chapter One

Sutton

The Hendricks account should have gone to Marcus.

Everyone in this office knows it, and everyone in this office is pretending they don't — including Marcus, who spent the better part of yesterday afternoon hovering near my desk with the specific energy of a man who wants credit for work he didn't do. I finished the quarterly projections he was supposed to deliver by nine this morning. I did it in forty minutes, sent them under his name per my director's instructions, and moved on to the three other tasks sitting in my queue before Marcus had finished his second cup of coffee.

This is Tuesday. Tuesday is not unusual.

I pull up the client correspondence folder on my screen, cross-reference it against the pipeline report I restructured last week, and flag two discrepancies that are going to become very expensive problems if nobodyaddresses them before the Friday review. I draft a memo to my director, keep it brief and factual, and send it before 10:00.

By 10:15 I am already on the phone with a vendor whose contract terms need renegotiating, my notepad covered in figures, my voice steady and pleasant in the way I have learned to make it when I need something from someone who doesn't think they need to give it to me.

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, Los Angeles is doing what it always does in October — behaving like summer never left, the sky an uninterrupted blue above the sprawl of the city. I have lived here for four years. I still find it beautiful in the way you find a place beautiful when you have not yet decided if it is home.

I end the call with a better contract than the one we started with and pull my attention to the next item on my list. Around me the office moves at its usual rhythm — keyboards, low conversations, the occasional burst of laughter from the cluster of desks near the kitchen. I work the way I always work, which is to say I work like the task in front of me is the only thing that exists until it's finished.

I’m halfway through a client analysis when the energy in the room changes. It isn’t loud. That’s the thing about bad news in professional spaces — it rarely announces itself. It travels instead as a shift in frequency, a sudden stillness where there was movement, a cluster of people near the conference room whose body languagehas reorganized itself into something I have learned to read. I save my document. I look up.

My director, Sandra, steps out of the glass-walled conference room with the particular expression of someone who has been given information they did not want and must now give it to others. Behind her, two men in suits I do not recognize stand near the whiteboard. Not vendors. Not clients. The suits are too careful, the posture too deliberate. These are men who have already made a decision and are here to communicate its terms.

Sandra raises her voice just enough to reach the full floor.

"Can I get everyone's attention, please?"

The keyboards stop.

By the time she finishes speaking, the wordsacquisitionandeffective immediatelyandtransition periodhave rearranged the air in the room into something heavier. Around me, I watch people absorb it in their different ways — the junior analyst two desks over goes very pale, the account manager near the window pulls out her phone immediately, Marcus from across the room makes eye contact with me in that reflexive way people do when they want someone else to tell them how to feel. I don’t give him a reaction to mirror. I turn back to my screen.

The analysis I was building is still open. I finish it. Not because it will matter — whatever transition is coming will make most of today's work irrelevant — but because I don’t know how to sit in uncertainty without doing something useful inside of it. When the floorbegins to fracture into whispered conversations and visible anxiety around me, I’m quietly making a list.

Skills I have. Skills I want. Industries I have been meaning to research for months. The tech sector, specifically, which has been pulling at the edge of my attention since I sat through a conference presentation last spring and realized I was the most engaged I had been professionally in two years. I write it all down in the small notebook I keep in my top drawer, the one nobody else in this office knows exists, and when Sandra appears at my desk twenty minutes later with the drawn expression of someone managing a controlled disaster, I look up with a composure that seems to briefly unsettle her.

"You're not worried?" She asks. It comes out half question, half observation.

"I'm practical," I tell her.

She gives me a look that is equal parts respect and something sadder, and moves to the next desk.

I close the notebook. Outside, the Los Angeles sky is still blue and relentless and completely indifferent, which is, I have come to understand, the city's defining characteristic. I find I don’t mind it today. I’ve always done better when I have something to build toward, and losing one door has never yet failed to make me look harder for another.

Caleb arrives at my apartment a little after seven. I hear his key in the lock before I see him — I gave him a copy eight months ago, which felt significant at the time and which I have thought about with decreasing frequency since. He comes in with the particular energyhe carries after a long day on set: jacket already half off, phone in hand, the loosened tie that means he's been in meetings he found tedious. He is handsome in a way that still registers — dark hair, easy smile, the kind of face that rooms respond to — and he moves through my apartment with the comfort of someone who belongs here, which is different from someone who has made it his own.

"Hey, you." He drops a kiss on my temple on his way to the kitchen.

"Long day?"

"You could say that." I’m at the kitchen island with my laptop open, the list from my notebook now expanded into a proper document.

"My firm got acquired today."