Page 49 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

I think about my parents in a ballroom in New York looking at the two of us and drawing conclusions I haven't drawn yet myself. I don't have a clean answer. That's not something I'm used to. I sit with it because I have noother choice, and the discomfort of it — the specific discomfort of a problem that won't resolve into clean lines no matter how long I look at it — tells me something I'm not ready to say out loud.

The city holds its light a little longer. I watch it go.

Chapter Fourteen

Sutton

New York hits differently at night.

I've been here before — for work, for a conference, once for a long weekend with Maggie that involved too much wine and not enough sleep. I know this city. But stepping out of the car onto the midtown sidewalk with Logan beside me and the skyline doing its impossible thing overhead, I feel something shift in the specific way things shift when the stakes have gotten higher without you fully registering the climb.

The hotel is the kind of place that doesn't need to announce itself. The quiet marble, low lighting, the particular hush of a lobby that understands the people walking through it value discretion above everything else. Logan checks us in with the efficiency of a man who has done this a hundred times and hands me my keycard in the elevator without looking up from his phone.

Adjacent rooms—same as always. Except nothingabout it is the same as always and we both know it. In Dallas the adjacent rooms were a deliberate professional distance — a line I told myself was important. In Chicago and DC and Boston that distance became something we crossed so regularly it stopped being a line at all.

Now, standing in this elevator in New York with him next to me and the city forty floors below us, the adjacent rooms feel less like professional cover and more like a formality we're both too smart to believe in.

I go to my room. I hang up the garment bag. I stand at the window for a moment and look at the city and I let myself do what I've beennotdoing for over three months — think about what tonight actually is.

He's going to introduce me as his date. I'm going to stand beside him in a room full of his world and I'm going to do what I've been doing since Dallas — play the role, hold the room, be the woman on his arm. Except I'm not playing anything anymore. I haven't been playing anything for a long time. The woman who is going to walk into that gala tonight is not performing a version of someone she isn't. She's just..her. Standing next tohim. The proximity to the truth of that is what frightens me in a way that Dallas never did.

In Dallas I didn't know what his voice sounded like at 2:00 in the morning. I didn't know the specific weight of his arm around me or what it felt like for him to be inside of me, and feel his manhood in between my thighs. To fall asleep against his chest or the way something moves across his face in unguarded moments that he doesn't know I've cataloged. I know all of it now. I've known itfor months. Walking into a room tonight and pretending to be his girlfriend when the ‘pretending’ stopped weeks ago, feels less like a performance and more like a quiet confession I'm making in public without his knowledge.

I get dressed. The gown is black this time — simpler than the emerald, fitted differently, the neckline lower. I do my hair and my makeup with the practiced efficiency of a woman who has learned to get ready in hotel rooms and I don't let myself look too long at my own reflection because I know what I'll find there and I'm not ready to deal with it tonight. I check the time. 6:53. He said to meet in the lobby at 7:00. I pick up my clutch and go.

He's standing in the grand lobby when I come down the elevator. Black tuxedo, white shirt, bow-tie, the salt and pepper of his hair combed back with the precision he applies to everything. He looks up when he hears the sound of my heels from behind and as he turns, something moves across his face — brief, there and gone, but I catch it. I've gotten very good at catching the things he thinks he's hiding.

"You look—" he starts.

"Don't," I say. Not because I don't want to hear it. Because the way he was about to say it would have done something to my composure that I can't afford right now.

He holds out his arm and I take it. We walk out into the New York night.

The gala is held at a venue on the Upper East Side — a converted townhouse that has been opened up for the occasion, the rooms flowing into each other, candlelight and flowers and the particular densityof serious money gathered for a serious cause. The Hargrove Foundation has been funding urban development initiatives for thirty years and the room reflects that history — old names, established families, the kind of people whose giving is generational rather than transactional.

Logan moves through it the way he moves through everything. I move through it beside him and the ease of it no longer surprises me. We've done this enough times now that the rhythm is instinct — who needs a conversation, who needs to be brief, where to be and when to be there. I handle three introductions within the first twenty minutes, fielding questions about Drake Industries' philanthropic commitments with a specificity that comes from three months of total immersion in his world.

We're an hour in when I see her.

Sonia arrives on the arm of a man I don't recognize — tall, silver-haired, the look of someone in finance or private equity. She moves through the room the way she always does, that particular unhurried quality of a woman who has belonged to spaces like this for decades. She has a drink in her hand and a smile that is warm in the way that things can be warm while also being very deliberate. She finds Logan within fifteen minutes.Of course she does.

I'm standing near the bar refreshing my champagne when I see her cross to where he's standing with two foundation board members. Her hand on his arm — the same gesture, the same angle, the same familiarity I've watched from across rooms in San Francisco and Boston. Logan is cordial. He's always cordial with her. But I knowhis cordial and I know his warm and they are not the same thing. I turn back to the bar.

"You've been to quite a few of these events."

I look up. Sonia is beside me. I don't know when she crossed the room — I didn't see her move. She has the smile fully deployed, a glass of white wine in her hand, her eyes doing that two-second assessment I've watched her apply before.

"A few," I say.

"You handle them well." She says it the way you say something that sounds like a compliment and isn't entirely.

"Logan always did have good instincts about the people he surrounds himself with professionally."

Professionally. The word lands exactly where she intended it to.

"He does," I say. My voice is even.

"These rooms can be — overwhelming. For people who aren't used to them." She tilts her head slightly.