Page 51 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"How long have you and Logan—"

"We work together," Logan says.

"We do," I agree. "And I'm his date tonight."

Something in Deborah's expression shifts — a warmth that hadn't quite been there before settling in. She releases my hand and steps slightly closer.

"Well. I'm very glad he brought someone." She shoots Logan a look that communicates volumes in the compact language of mothers and sons.

"He usually doesn't."

"Deborah," his father says. One word. She ignores itwith the practiced ease of a woman who has been ignoring that particular tone for forty years.

"Tell me about yourself," she says to me, and she means it. It isn't small talk. It is a genuine question from a woman who is interested in the answer.

I talk to Deborah Drake for twenty minutes. She is not easy to charm — I understand that within the first three sentences. She has spent decades in the orbit of powerful people and she assesses them with the accuracy of someone who stopped being impressed by surface things a long time ago. But she is genuinely warm, genuinely curious, and somewhere in the second half of our conversation about the Drake Foundation's urban development work she stops asking questions and starts making observations, which is the specific transition that happens when someone has decided they like you.

Throughout all of it, somewhere in the back of my mind, a quieter thing is happening. She doesn't know my name. Neither does Jack. I watched both of their faces when Logan introduced me — looking for a flicker of recognition, the slight adjustment that happens when someone hears a name they've heard before.Nothing.Sutton Kane means nothing to either of them.

Caleb never told them about me. Not once. Not my name, not my face, not the fact that we dated for over a year. I was a part of his life for over one year, and his parents are looking at me right now with the open eyes of people meeting a stranger. To them I am simply Logan's date.

I smile at something Deborah says and I hold thatrealization in my chest. I don't let it show on my face and I think about what it means to be with someone who doesn't claim you. Who keeps you in the margins of his life while you're standing in the center of yours. Who looks at a year and sees something not worth mentioning to the people who matter most to him.

And then I think — with the particular clarity that arrives at the worst possible moments — about the man standing less than ten feet away from me who has been sticking his dick inside of me for the past three months and has never once told me what I am to him.

Two Drake men. Two different versions of the same…invisible.

Deborah is saying something about the foundation's new initiative and I respond with the right words, I smile with the right warmth and I hold the entire weight of what I'm feeling somewhere no one can see it.

Near the end of the evening, Deborah has been claimed by a foundation board member she clearly knows well, and I'm standing with a fresh glass of champagne, when Logan's father appears beside me with the quiet deliberateness of a man who has been waiting for an opening.

"Sutton." He has Logan's directness — the same economy of language, the same quality of attention that suggests he is always thinking more than he's saying.

"Are you enjoying New York?"

"Very much," I say.

"It's a remarkable venue this evening."

"It is." He looks out at it briefly, then backat me.

"Logan seems comfortable tonight."

It's a simple observation. I'm not sure it's only an observation. I don't know what to do with that. I hold his gaze.

"I'm glad the evening has gone well," which is not an answer and we both know it. Jack almost smiles. It doesn't quite reach completion but it gets close.

"It was good to meet you," he says.

Then he moves back into the room and that's the end of it. I stand there for a moment.

Logan finds me near the exit as the evening draws to a close. He appears at my side with the specific quality of someone who has been tracking me for the last twenty minutes and has decided the evening is finished. His hand finds the small of my back — not for the room, not for the performance, just because it does. It's been doing that all night and I've stopped cataloging it as something to examine and started cataloging it as just what happens when he's standing beside me.

"Ready?" he says.

I look up at him. The evening is sitting on both of us — his parents, Sonia's comment, the men I spoke to whom he definitely noticed, all of it layered and present and unspoken. His face is doing what it does — giving me just enough and not everything.

"Ready," I say.