Page 99 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"Obviously yes."

He slides the ring onto my finger. He stands. He takes my face in his hands and he looks at me — at the ring, at my face, at whatever expression I'm wearing that I couldn't describe because I've stopped being able to track anything except him.

"Obviously," he repeats. Something moves at the corner of his mouth.

"You had to have known," I say.

"I knew," he says. "I wanted to hear it."

He kisses me. Right there at the waterfront with the bay behind us and the city ahead and the ring warm on my finger and the whole improbable, fought-for, entirely real year of this sitting between us like something we built together with both hands.

When he pulls back I'm laughing. Not the polished version — the real one, unguarded, the laugh that comes when something is so good you don't have language for it and your body finds another way.

He is smiling. Fully. The smile I've spent a year cataloging in its smallest increments and which is still, every time, something I want to stand inside of for as long as he'll let me.

"What now?" I say.

He looks at me.

"Now we go home," he says.

I take his hand. We walk back along the waterfront — the city bright behind us, the water dark and steady beside us, the night holding everything we just said with the specific care of a moment that knows its own weight.

My finger is warm where the ring sits. My life looks nothing like I planned when I left Los Angeles. It is so much better than anything I planned that I can't be anything except grateful — for the acquisition that cost me my job, for the referral I almost didn't follow up on, for the man who didn't look up from his desk that first morning and who has been looking at me ever since.

I hold his hand. I match his stride. We walk.

Epilogue

Sutton

ONE YEAR LATER

Saturday mornings in this house have their own rhythm. Logan is up before me — always, without exception, the one constant from the man I met nearly two years ago that marriage has not altered in the slightest.

By the time I come downstairs he has already made coffee, already reviewed the overnight correspondence on his tablet, already done whatever version of the morning he needs before the world requires anything of him. The difference is that now he makes two cups. He has the second one waiting on the counter without being asked, without ceremony, just there — the way he does most things for me now. Quietly. Consistently. Without announcement.

I find him at the kitchen island when I come down. Dark lounge pants, bare feet on the hardwood, readingsomething on his tablet with the focused attention he gives everything. He looks up when he hears me. His eyes move over my face the way they always do in the mornings — unhurried, taking stock.

"Coffee's ready," he says.

"I see that." I pick up the mug.

"What time did you get up?"

"6:15," he says.

"It's Saturday."

"I'm aware." He looks back at his tablet.

"There's a situation with the Meridian acquisition timeline that needs addressing before Monday."

I lean against the counter across from him and I drink my coffee and I look at this man — my husband, in our kitchen, in our house, on a Saturday morning — and I feel the specific warmth of a life that fits.

The house is in Presidio Heights. Four bedrooms, a garden that Logan has no particular interest in but that I've been slowly transforming on weekends, a kitchen that is genuinely large enough to cook in together without one of us conceding territory.

We moved in eight months ago, three months after the wedding, which was small and private and exactly what both of us wanted — our immediate family, Maggie, Paul and Charlie, a dinner afterward that went until midnight. Deborah cried. Jack shook Logan's hand and pulled him into a brief, firm embrace that said everything neither of them would put into words. It was the best night of my life up to that point. Several nights since have givenit competition.