Page 52 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

We walk out into the New York night together. The car is waiting. The city is doing what New York does at this hour — alive and relentless and entirely indifferent to the specific weight of two peoplesitting in the back of a car carrying everything they haven't said to each other yet.

His hand rests on his knee. Mine rests on mine. The distance between them is very small. I look out the window at the city going past and I think about Deborah's face when she looked at her son tonight — the specific warmth of a woman seeing something she recognized.

I think about Jack's quiet observation. I think about Sonia's carefully aimed words. I think about Caleb's erasure and the year I spent being someone's secret. And now I sit with the thought of how the past three months I've spent being someone else's secret, and the question underneath all of it that I don't have an answer for.

I think about the way Logan has been looking at me tonight—not for the room. Not for the performance. just…looking. The way a man looks at something he's trying to understand and can't quite solve.

I know that look. I've seen it in Boston. I see it now in the reflection of the car window — him turned slightly toward me, his jaw set, his eyes on the side of my face. I don't turn. I let him look.

The hotel appears ahead of us and I feel it — the specific charge of a night that has too much in it to end cleanly. Too much said and too much not said. Too much real bleeding through everything that was supposed to be managed and contained and professional.

It stopped being any of those things a long time ago. The car stops. We get out. We ride the elevator in silence. The floor comes up to meet us and we walk down the corridor toward our adjacent rooms and I feel the wholeevening pressing against the inside of my chest — heavy, complicated, devastating in its specificity.

He stops at the door. I turn to look at him. The corridor is quiet. The city is forty floors below. His face in the low light of the hallway is everything I've learned to read over time, and right now it's telling me something I don't have the courage to name.

We look at each other for a long moment. The keycard is in my hand. The door is right there, but neither of us moves toward it.

Chapter Fifteen

Logan

The car pulls up to the hotel at 6:45.

I'm already dressed. I've been ready for twenty minutes, which is not unusual. What is unusual is that I've spent those twenty minutes standing at the window looking at nothing in particular instead of reviewing the donor brief I've already memorized. I pick up my phone. Put it back down.

At 6:55 I go downstairs.

The lobby is quiet at this hour. I take a position near the base of the staircase and check my messages and I am doing a reasonable impression of a man who is simply waiting.

Then I hear her heels on the marble floor. I look up before I've decided to.

She's in black tonight. A gown that fits her differently than the emerald did in Dallas — lower at the neckline, simpler in its construction, which somehow makes it more devastating. Her hair is up, a few pieces loose ather jaw. She comes down the stairs with the ease of a woman who has stopped needing to think about how she moves in a room and I watch her the entire way down. Something crosses my face. I feel it happen and I can't stop it.

"You look—" I start.

"Don't," she says.

I offer my arm. She takes it. We walk out into the city.

The Hargrove Foundation gala is exactly what I expected and she is better than I expected — which is saying something, because my expectations of Sutton Kane stopped being modest months ago.

She handles the first hour beside me with the fluency of someone who has absorbed everything about this world and made it her own. Three introductions in the first twenty minutes, each one fielded with a precision and warmth that I watch from two feet away with the awareness of a man who understands exactly how rare this is. These rooms eat people who aren't ready for them. She moves through it like she was built here.

I work the room the way I always work it. Foundation board members. Major donors. A conversation with a venture partner whose interest in our AI division has been developing for months. I keep one part of my attention on the work and one part of it — against my better judgment and my complete inability to stop — on her.

Sonia finds me at the forty-five minute mark. She appears at my side with the unhurried timing she always brings to these things — a glass of champagne, a smile, thespecific ease of a woman who considers every room she enters her natural territory.

"Logan." She says my name with the warmth she always deploys first.

"Sonia." I'm cordial. I'm always cordial with Sonia.

"I didn't know you'd be here."

"The Hargrove board and I go back a long way." She glances around the room. Her eyes land briefly on Sutton before returning to me.

"You brought someone?"

"I brought Sutton. You’ve met her before," I say.