Page 59 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

***

The flight is six hours back to San Francisco. She opens her notes after we finish climbing. I open my laptop. The work fills the space the way it always does in public — reliable, familiar, the thing we've always been able to fall back on. But the silence underneath the work is different now. Looser. Like something that has stoppedholding its breath.

I think about Caleb somewhere over Pennsylvania. Not with guilt — our relationship has been built of distance for years and I've made my peace with that. But with clarity. What's happening between me and Sutton stopped being something I could categorize as temporary a long time ago. I kept using that word because I didn't have a better one ready. I have a better one now. I'm not ready to say it out loud. But I have it.

She falls asleep somewhere over Ohio. Her head tips slightly toward my shoulder and she catches herself and straightens — the automatic reflex of a woman who has spent months being careful about what she shows in professional spaces.

I reach over. I put my hand over hers on the armrest. She goes still. Then she turns her hand over and her fingers close around mine. She looks out the window. She doesn't say anything. Neither do I.

The Bay comes into view below — gray-blue, the bridges, the fog over the hills. I look at it coming toward us and I know two things with the same quiet certainty I apply to everything I've stopped arguing with.

I am not going to end this.

I am in love with her.

I don't say either of those things out loud. Not yet. But I know them the way I know things I've stopped arguing with — completely, and without any remaining room for negotiation.

I look at her profile for one moment, then I close my laptop. I hold her hand as the wheels touch down.

Chapter Sixteen

Sutton

Two weeks after New York and the office feels different.

Not in any way I could point to directly — the desk is the same, the morning briefings happen at the same time, the correspondence queue populates overnight the way it always has. Logan arrives before 8:00, I arrive at 7:55. We cover the day's priorities with the same efficiency we've maintained since my first week. On the surface nothing has changed, but underneath it everything has.

It's in the way he looks at me across the conference table during strategy sessions — not long, not obvious, just present in a way that lands low in my gut every time. It's in the fact that I'm in those strategy sessions at all. Three months ago I was coordinating the logistics around them. Now I'm sitting at the table, contributing to the substance of them, and nobody has formally acknowledged the shift because Logan doesn't make announcementsabout things like this. He simply adjusts his expectations upward and waits to see if you meet them.

I've been meeting them.

He's been pulling me into conversations that have no business involving his executive assistant — donor strategy discussions, a preliminary meeting with a potential board candidate, a call with the foundation's legal counsel about the infrastructure grant structure. Each time it happens I tell myself it's circumstantial. He needed someone in the room. I was available. It's efficient. I've been telling myself this for weeks and I'm starting to believe it less each time.

Because here is the thing I haven't let myself examine too closely; I don't know if I'm rising in this world because I've earned itorbecause I'm in his bed. I don't know if the access he's giving me is a reflection of my capability or a reflection of something else entirely. And I cannot ask him. Not without making something professional into something personal, which is the specific line we have never officially drawn and which I have therefore been navigating entirely by…feeling.

On a Tuesday morning he sends me into a donor briefing with Keith and two members of the development team while he takes a call he can't reschedule. I run the room. I answer every question about the foundation's Q1 infrastructure priorities with the depth that six months of immersion has given me. When Logan comes in at the forty-minute mark I don't miss a beat. I finish my point. I hand the room back to Keith. I take my seat.

Logan doesn't say anything after. He never saysanything directly. But I feel his eyes on me from across the conference table and when I finally look up he's already looking back down at his folder and something in the line of his jaw is different than usual. I sit with that for the rest of the morning.

***

Maggie is making pasta when I get home. She does this when she's been thinking about something — cooks elaborate things that take longer than necessary, which gives her hands something to do while her brain does its work. I've known her long enough to recognize the tell. I drop my bag, pour myself a glass of the wine she's already opened, and sit on the kitchen counter.

"Okay," I say. "What?"

She looks up from the pot.

"What do you mean, what?"

"You're making fresh pasta on a Tuesday."

She considers denying it. Then she sets down the wooden spoon.

"How are you?"

"Fine."

"How are you actually?"