Page 93 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"So your solution," I say slowly, "is to put the walls back up."

"My solution is to be thoughtful—"

"Your solution," I say, my voice dropping to somethingquieter and more dangerous than raised, "is to do exactly what Caleb said you would do; put me somewhere manageable. Somewhere that doesn't cost you anything."

He flinches. It's small. I see it.

"That is not what I'm doing," he says.

"Then tell me what you're doing." I take the last step toward him. We're two feet apart.

"Because from where I'm standing the man who told me I wasn't in a box, who told his brother he loved me before he told me, who had a key made and asked me to stay — that man has been replaced by someone I don't recognize. And I need to know which one is real."

He looks at me. He opens his mouth.

"Logan." My voice is completely steady.

"I need more than efficient and careful. I know you can give me more than that because you have been giving me more than that. So either tell me what's actually happening inside you right now — not the managed version, the real version — or I'm going to walk out that door."

The penthouse holds its breath—the silence is deafening. He is still. The specific stillness I've learned to read — the one that means everything is happening underneath the surface and nothing is being let out.

"I need some time," he says finally.

It lands like a door closing. I look at him for a long moment. I take in the set of his jaw, the way he's holding himself, the controlled distance of a man retreating behind the only thing he's ever fully trusted — himself, alone, with no one close enough to cost him anything.

"Okay," I say.

I pick up my bag from the counter. I pull on my jacket. I walk to the door. I stop with my hand on the handle and I turn back to look at him one more time.

"I love you," I say. Clearly. Without desperation, without manipulation. Just the truth, placed in the room.

"And I know you love me. But love without presence is just a feeling you're carrying around alone. I won't do that." I hold his gaze.

"When you're ready to show up the way I know you can, I'll be here. But I won't wait forever."

I open the door, and I walk out without looking back.

I don't call Maggie. I just walk. The city is doing its Saturday morning thing — farmers market crowds, dog walkers, the particular texture of a weekend in Pacific Heights when the sun is out and the fog has stayed offshore. I walk through all of it and I feel the weight of the past hour and I let myself feel it without trying to process it into something manageable.

I am sad. That's the honest truth. I am genuinely, deeply sad in the specific way of someone who has built something real and is watching the person they built it with retreat from it.

But I am not devastated. That's the other truth — the one that would have surprised the version of me who arrived in San Francisco over nine months ago with a suitcase and an ambition and a boyfriend who never quite saw her.ThatSutton would have collapsed. Would have bent herself into whatever shape seemed most likely to make him stay.

ThisSutton walks through Pacific Heights on a Saturday morning and feels the sadness and stands up straight inside it. I know what I want. I know what I deserve. I know that Logan Drake is capable of being the man I need him to be because I have watched him be that man for months. What I don't know is whether the fear is going to win.

I sit on a bench in the park two blocks from his building. The sun is warm on my face. I think about everything that led here — Cleveland, Los Angeles, the phone call from Patricia, the first morning briefing when he barely looked up from his desk. I think about Dallas and Boston and New York and the night he stood outside my building and called from the car. I think about the specific way he saidpleasein a hotel corridor when he didn't want me to leave. I think about waking up next to him.

That man is still in there. I know he is. I'm giving him the time he asked for. Not because I'm afraid of losing him — because I understand that what he's fighting is real and it doesn't get defeated by pressure. It gets defeated by him choosing, fully and finally, to put it down.

I get up from the bench. I pull my jacket tighter. I start walking home. Whatever comes next is his to decide. I've said everything I have to say. I've done my part.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Logan

Every room I walk through in this penthouse carries the absence of her. The kitchen where she stood at the counter and told me about Cleveland. The dining table where we sat until midnight talking about nothing that mattered and everything that did. The side of the bed where she sleeps — where she slept — the indentation still faintly there, which I've been ignoring for the past several days with the focused determination of a man who has decided not to look at something.

I've been working. Of course I've been working. Fourteen-hour days, the kind I used to run on before she changed the architecture of my evenings. The work is good. The work is always good. It doesn't ask anything of me except output and I give it output and at the end of the day I come home to this apartment and the roar starts again.