Page 61 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"Have you told him?"

"No."

"Why not?"

I turn the wine glass in my hands.

"Because if I ask and the answer is that this is — just what it is. Just the affair. Just the arrangement." I stop.

"I'm not ready for that answer."

"So you're protecting yourself from an answer you're afraid of by not asking the question."

"When you say it like that it sounds—"

"Accurate?" she says. Gently. No accusation in it.

I look at her. "He's not Caleb," I say.

"Whatever this is, it's not the same.He sees me. He shows up. The way he is when we're alone — it's not nothing, Maggie."

"I believe you," she says.

"I do." She comes around the counter and sits beside me.

"I just need you to make sure you're watching what he does and not just what you want him to do. Because you're smart and you're strong and you have a way of making meaning out of things that are ambiguous because you need there to be meaning." She bumps her shoulder against mine.

"Watch what he does. Not what you hope he means."

I sit with that. The pasta water boils. The city does its thing outside the window. I think about Logan in that corridor again—the way his voice went quiet when he saidpleaseand I understood it cost him something to say it.

"I'm watching," I say.

"Good." She slides off the counter and goes back to the stove.

"Now tell me something easy."

I laugh. It's small and tired and real.

"I got asked to run a donor briefing by myself today."

Maggie looks over her shoulder.

"How'd it go?"

"Really well."

She smiles. "Of course it did."

We eat dinner while catching up on some TV. We both go to bed earlier than usual, butsleep doesn't find me so easily.

***

The professional recognition comes on a Thursday. There's a midmorning meeting — Logan, Keith, two members of the development team, and a woman named Clara Reeves who I met at the Boston conference. She's a venture partner, fifteen years in the enterprise space, the kind of person whose opinion carries weight in every room she's in. She and Logan are discussing the AI division's expansion timeline and I'm in the room in my operational capacity, managing the documentation.

Forty minutes in the conversation turns to the foundation's infrastructure framework and how it intersects with the expansion strategy. I have something to say about it. I know I have something to say about it because I spent two hours with that framework last week and I see the connection that nobody in this room has made yet.

I look at Logan. He's already looking at me — that fractional thing, the slight forward attention that means he knows I'm about to speak and is waiting.