Page 67 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"I liked her, Logan." Her voice has the particular warmth it gets when she's decided to be direct.

"I want you to know that. Not as a performance, not as me saying the right thing. I genuinely liked her. She's sharp and she's real. And the way she looked at you like—" She stops herself.

"She's good," she continues.

"I know she is."

"Then act like it," she says, and then a pause.

"That's all I'm going to say about it."

"Mom—"

"I mean it. That's all." Her tone shifts — lighter, moving on the way she moves on when she's made her point.

"How are the expansion timelines?"

We talk for ten more minutes about the AI division and my father's back and a charitable trust matter the family attorney raised last week. Normal things. When we hang up I sit with the call for a moment and then I open my laptop and I get back to work.

The day moves. The afternoon moves. At 6:15 I receive a text from a number I haven't seen appear on my phone in four months.

Caleb: Hey. Going to be in SF next week. Let me know if you have time to grab a drink.

I read it once. I set the phone down on my desk. I look out the window at the city.

Caleb in San Francisco. Casual text, casual framing —let me know if you have time.My brother has not been to San Francisco in over a year. Hedoesn't make trips without a reason and he doesn't frame things casually when they aren't casual. I know how he operates because we grew up in the same house and we were shaped by the same forces and whatever distance has grown between us over the years hasn't changed the fact that I can read him.

My parents spoke to him after New York. My mother would have mentioned Sutton — not as information, just as part of describing the evening. She didn't know what she was handing him. She didn't know there was anything to hand.

Caleb knows now. Or he knows enough. And Caleb — who ended a year-long relationship over a phone call, who referred his former girlfriend to my company without telling me who she was, who has been casually absent from both our lives for months — is coming to San Francisco.

I pick up the phone. I type back.

Logan: I'll make time. Let me know when you land.

I send it. I set the phone down. I'm not afraid of this conversation. That's the thing I understand most clearly, sitting here in this apartment on a Saturday evening with the city below me and everything that's been building for seven months pressing against the present moment. I am not afraid of my brother or the conversation we are about to have or the specific accounting he's going to want to do.

What I feel is something different from fear. Something that has more clarity in it. More weight. Caleb is coming and I already know what I'm going to say whenhe gets here. I know it the way I knew it in that New York corridor when I saidplease,and asked her to stay. I meant it in a way I haven't meant anything in ten years. The decision was made before I was ready to call it a decision. I close the phone. I turn back to my desk.

Whatever comes next — I'm not running from it.

Chapter Eighteen

Sutton

Caleb texts on a Monday morning.

I'm at my desk reviewing the foundation correspondence when my phone buzzes. His name on the screen. The message is exactly as casual as I expected it to be.

Caleb: In San Francisco for a few days. Would be good to see you. Coffee?

I read it once. I set the phone face down. I pick up the foundation brief and I read the same paragraph twice without absorbing it. Then I put the brief down and I pick the phone back up.

I knew this was coming. The call two weeks ago was the setup. This is the follow-through. I type back before I talk myselfinto overthinking it.

Sutton: I have work. I can do 7:30 AM tomorrow before I'm in the office. Or at noon.

His reply comes in two minutes.