Page 76 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

He takes a few steps, restless, the energy in him needing somewhere to go.

"She deserves someone who actually shows up for her. You know that, right?

“Did you show up for her?” I ask him blatantly.

He stops. He looks at me.

“Not the way I should have.” Then a beat.

"But I own that. Do you? That's what you do as well, you know? You did it with Giselle. You'll do it with her."

I feel the words land. I let them.

"You're not wrong about Giselle," I say.

He blinks. He wasn't expecting that.

"I was absent," I say.

"I was building the company and Itold myself that was enough — that providing was the same as being present. It wasn't. She was lonely and I was unavailable and we destroyed something between us over years of small failures." I pause.

"I've lived with that."

"Then you know—"

"I know that Sutton is not Giselle." I say it quietly.

"And I am not the same man I was in that marriage."

Caleb is still. He looks at me with the wary attention of someone who has heard me deflect his entire life and is waiting for the deflection. It doesn't come.

"She's not something I'm managing," I say.

"She's not a situation I'm containing. She's not a chapter that's going to close when it becomes inconvenient." I look at my brother directly.

"I love her, Caleb."

The room goes completely silent. Caleb stares at me. Whatever he came here prepared for — it wasn't this. I watch it move through him, watch the anger recalibrate around something he didn't expect to find in this conversation tonight. His brother. Using that word. Without armor. Without qualification.

"You—" he starts.

"I know what I said." I don't look away from him.

Caleb is quiet for a long moment. He looks at the floor. He looks at the window. He looks back at me with the specific expression of a man who came to a fight and found something else waiting for him.

"Does she know?" he asks. His voice is different now —the heat has gone out of it. What's left is something quieter.

"Not yet."

I haven't told her yet. I'm telling you because you came here and you deserve the truth. Whatever happened between you two — that was real. I'm not dismissing it. But what this is now is also real. And I'm not walking away from it."

He exhales slowly.

"You should tell her." He says it without warmth, but also without cruelty. Just plainly.

"She deserves to hear it."

"I know."