Page 65 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

An hour later I hear her on the phone at her desk — professional, focused, the register she uses when the conversation matters. I don't listen to the content. I just hear the tone of it and I turn back to my screen.

She stops in my doorway at 4:30.

"That was generous," she says. Her voice is steady butthere's something underneath it — something careful, like she's handling the moment with both hands.

I look up from the document I'm reviewing.

"It was accurate. You earned that conversation."

She looks at me for a moment.

"It could go somewhere."

"I know."

"You know it might mean—"

"I know what it might mean." I hold her gaze.

“That doesn't change whether it was the right thing to do."

She's quiet. Something moves across her face that she doesn't fully contain — surprise, maybe, or something softer than that. She nods once. She goes back to her desk.

I turn back to the document. I read the same paragraph twice before it registers.

***

Charlie calls on a Thursday evening. I'm at home — the apartment, the scotch I've already poured, the city doing its nighttime thing below the windows. I answer because it's Charlie and Charlie only calls in the evening when he has something to say that won't wait until Saturday.

"You free?" he asks.

"I'm home."

"I'll come to you."

He arrives twenty minutes later with theenergy of a man who has been sitting on something and is done sitting on it. I pour him a drink. We stand at the window for a moment in the way that's been our default since business school — side by side, looking at the city, neither of us needing to fill the opening silence.

"New York," Charlie says.

"What about it."

"I talked to Paul." He turns his drink in his hand.

"He said you were different at the gala."

"Paul wasn't at the gala."

"He talked to your mother." Charlie looks at me sideways.

"Apparently she called him."

I absorb this. My mother calling Paul is not unprecedented. It's also not something she does without reason.

"What exactly are you working up to, Charlie?" I ask.

"What are you doing with her, Logan?" He says it directly. No sideways approach this time, no golf course spacing between the question and the asking of it. Just the question, clear and straight, from a man who has known me long enough to earn it.

I look out at the city.