Page 41 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"Flight's on time," he says.

"Good morning to you too," I say.

The corner of his mouth moves. Barely.

"Good morning."

We board first class, side by side, and settle into the familiar rhythm of shared work travel — his laptop open, mine open, the material for the conference distributed between us. The professional architecture holds perfectly at 30,000 feet, the same way it holds in the office. We are colleagues. We are efficient. We are very good at this particular performance.

Somewhere over Ohio his hand finds mine on the armrest between us — not taking it, just his fingers resting over mine for thirty seconds before he returns to his screen without comment. I look out the window and say nothing and feel the warmth move through my whole arm.

The hotel is a Four Seasons near the conference center, clean and quiet and expensive. We check in at adjacent rooms — the same configuration we've had in every city, the pattern so established now that neither of us mentions it. I unpack, hang the dress I brought for the evening session, and review my notes for the afternoon panel I'll be sitting in on.

At 1:00 I knock on his door.

He opens it in a different suit — navy, perfectly cut —his hair combed back, the salt and pepper of it catching the afternoon light from the window behind him. He looks at me for a moment in the doorway.

"Ready?" he says.

"Always," I say.

The conference is held across two floors of the hotel's event center — a gathering of enterprise tech executives, investors, and the specific category of person who operates at the intersection of both. It is the kind of room I've been in a dozen times now, and I move through it with the ease of someone who stopped needing to remind herself she belongs here.

I handle the first hour without Logan — he's in a closed session with a group of board-level contacts while I work the general networking floor. I speak to a VP of infrastructure from a Boston-based firm who asks sharp questions about Drake Industries' AI development timeline and gets sharp answers. I have a twenty-minute conversation with a venture partner named Clara Reeves who has been watching the enterprise space for fifteen years and who tells me, at the end of it, that I should think about the investment side of things.

"You have good instincts," she says.

"And you understand the landscape. That's rarer than people think."

I thank her and move on and tuck the comment somewhere I'll take out later.

Logan finds me during the afternoon break. He appears at my shoulder while I'm in conversation with a Chicago-based developer I met at the Dallas galamonths ago, and I feel him a half-second before he arrives — the shift in the air, the warmth. He places his hand briefly at the small of my back as he joins the conversation, a gesture so practiced it reads as natural to everyone watching. To me it reads as everything it always has.

Later, across the room, I catch him watching me handle a difficult question from a skeptical senior executive who has a habit of talking over people. I don't let him. I hold the floor with the specific patience of someone who has spent six months learning from a man who never loses a room, and when I make my point the executive nods and adjusts and the conversation moves on.

Logan's expression from across the room doesn't change. But something in his eyes does — the particular sharpening of attention that I've learned to read as his version of impressed. He looks away before I can hold his gaze too long. I've learned his language. He's right that he's never said well done directly. He doesn't need to.

I'm in conversation with two conference attendees near the far end of the room when I feel it — the prickle at the back of my neck that means something has shifted in the social geography around me. I glance over my shoulder and see..Sonia.

She's arrived in the way she always arrives — unhurried, deliberate, wearing the conference the way she wears every room, like she designed it. She's already found Logan. She's standing close to him, her body angled toward his in the way I've noticed before, her hand touching his arm as she says something thatmakes him respond with the polite, contained expression he gives people he's managing rather than engaging.

I turn back to my conversation, and I don't look back across the room. I don't need to — the image is already there, Sonia's body angled toward Logan, her hand on his arm, the particular quality of her attention that has never been remotely professional. I know this. I've known it since the first industry event in San Francisco.

What I didn't know, until this exact moment, is how much it would bother me. The feeling is specific and unwelcome. It sits in my chest like something with teeth and I recognize it with the clarity of someone who has been trying to avoid recognizing it for weeks. I'm not supposed to feel this. We don't have an arrangement that gives me the right to feel this. We have hotel rooms and closed doors and an unspoken agreement not to examine anything too closely, and none of that gives me standing to feel my jaw tighten because a woman is talking to him at a conference.

I feel it anyway.

My conversation wraps up. I excuse myself. I cross toward the bar for a water I don't particularly need and I do not look in Logan's direction and I stand there with my glass and I breathe and I tell myself this is fine.

It's fine.However, it is not fine by the time we get back to the hotel.

We debrief in the elevator — the day's outcomes, the contacts worth following up, the panel session tomorrow morning that needs preparation. Professional. Clean. I give him the notes I made and he reviews them in theelevator and nods twice and that is the extent of the conversation.

At my door I slide my keycard and push it open and I'm halfway inside when I say, without fully planning to, "Sonia was there today."

He's at his own door as he pauses.

"I know. I spoke to her briefly."