Page 97 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

He is present. Fully, consistently, in the specific way I needed him to be and asked him to be and was prepared to walk away from him over. He shows up. Every time. I still notice it every time. I probably always will.

Maggie comes for dinner on a Thursday. She brings two bottles of wine and her friend Priya from the accounting firm and a womannamed Delia who she met at a yoga class and who has opinions about everything delivered with such warmth that it's impossible to object. My friend Jenna drove up from LA for the weekend and is already on the couch with a glass when everyone else arrives. It becomes the kind of evening that fills an apartment — overlapping conversations, someone finding the good playlist, the specific warmth of a room full of women who are genuinely glad to be in the same place.

We eat. We drink. The conversation moves through the topics that matter and the topics that don't and there's no distinction between the two in terms of how much everyone is laughing.

At some point the others have migrated to the living room and it's just Maggie and me in the kitchen, her refilling glasses, me finishing the last of the cheese board. The sound of the other three comes through clearly — Delia is explaining something with great enthusiasm — and Maggie leans against the counter and looks at me with the expression she wears when she's been holding something and has decided to say it.

"You look different," she says.

"You've said that before," I tell her.

"Last time I said it you'd just started the job and you were terrified but pretending not to be." She tilts her head.

"This is different. You look — settled."

"I am settled," I say. "Is that surprising?"

"No." She smiles.

"It's just good to see. I wasn't sure, for a while,whether San Francisco was going to give you what you came for."

"It gave me considerably more than I came for," I say.

"Logan included," she says with a knowing nod.

"Logan included," I respond, with a pleasing smile.

Maggie is quiet for a moment. She looks down at her wine glass.

"I was hard on you about him, early on. Some of those conversations—"

"You were asking the right questions," I say.

"I needed someone to ask them."

"He's good for you," she says. It costs her nothing to say it — she means it completely.

"Not because he's Logan Drake or because of any of the external things. Because of the way you are when you're with him. You don't make yourself smaller. You never made yourself smaller for him."

I look at her. "No," I say.

"He never asked me to."

She raises her glass. I raise mine.

"To San Francisco," she says.

"To better than I planned," I say.

We drink. In the living room Delia has reached the punchline of whatever she's been building toward and the laughter is immediate and loud and Maggie and I look at each other and go back to join them.

Logan picks me up at 9:30…

The girls have gone — Jenna back to her hotel,Maggie and Priya and Delia into the Thursday night. The apartment is quiet in the specific way it goes quiet after a room full of people has emptied, warm still, the good smell of the evening still present.

He texts from the car.

Logan: Outside.