Page 48 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"Patricia can handle the travel," I say.

"I need you focused on the room. I'll have the donor brief pulled this week."

She nods. She makes a note. She standsto leave.

"Sutton."

She stops.

"It's an important room," I say.

"More so than Dallas."

She looks at me over her shoulder.

"I know," she says. "I'll be ready."

She leaves and I turn back to my desk and I sit there for a moment with the invitation in front of me.

Twenty minutes later my phone rings. It's my mother. I answer it because I always answer when my mother calls, which is a habit installed early and never successfully uninstalled. She talks for four minutes about my father's back, about the renovation happening in their Upper East Side home, about the Hargrove gala — and then she stops.

"Your father and I will be there," she says.

"The Hargrove board asked him to present the urban development grant this year. We're looking forward to seeing you."

I'm quiet for a moment. "I didn't know you'd be attending."

"We RSVP'd last month. I assumed your office would have the guest list." A pause.

"Are you bringing someone?"

"I'll have a colleague with me," I say.

"A colleague." My mother's voice carries the specific inflection of a woman who has raised two sons and knows when she's being managed.

"We'll look forward to meeting her."

I don't correct the pronoun. We speak for another two minutes. I say the right things. I end the call with the practiced ease of a man who has been managing his parents' expectations for the better part of forty years.

Then I set the phone down. Jack and Deborah Drake. New York. The same room. The same evening. I pull up the guest list that Patricia forwarded last week and I read through it with a different kind of attention than I gave it the first time. My parents know Caleb well. They know Caleb's life the way parents know things — in pieces, not fully, through the filter of what he chooses to share. Whether they know about Sutton — about who she was to him — I don't know. Caleb and I don't discuss his personal life and he doesn't discuss mine and the information may have traveled or it may not have.

What I know is that my mother will ask questions. She asks questions the way other people breathe — continuously and without particular effort. And my father will watch. He's always watching. He says less than my mother and lands harder every time.

I sit at my desk with the guest list in front of me and I think through it the way I think through every complicated situation — systematically, looking for the clean answer. The move that resolves it neatly. There isn't one.

Sutton in that room, on my arm, in front of my parents — there is no version of that evening I can fully control. My mother will draw her own conclusions. My father will draw his. And Sutton, who has no idea that any of this is coming, will be standing inthe middle of it.

I could take someone else. The thought arrives and I set it aside before it fully forms.I'm not going to take someone else.I could go alone.Also not happening.

I could tell Sutton about my parents in advance. Brief her the way I brief her for everything else — methodically, thoroughly, giving her what she needs to navigate the room. That's the rational approach. That's what I'll do.

What I can't account for — what sits outside the clean lines of any plan I make — is what my parents will see when they look at us together. My mother has been watching me for forty-six years. She will see whatever is there to see and she will not pretend she doesn't. I'm not entirely sure what's there to see.

I close the guest list. I look out at the city. The afternoon light is doing its San Francisco thing — sharp, clean, the bay visible in the distance between buildings, the fog not yet rolling in.

Three weeks.

I think about Paul's voice on the golf course.Loneliness with good posture.I think about the way Sutton looked in the doorway of her Boston hotel room before I stopped the door from closing. I think about the way she felt in my arms that night, her cheek against my chest, her breathing going slow and even while the city did its quiet thing outside the window.