“That’s not—”
“It is, though. It’sexactlythat.” He leaned forward. “And then you came to a ridiculous nude resort you didn’t want to go to, and within four days, a man with a camera looked at the whole intimidating bulk of you and didn’t flinch or step back or go home with someone smaller. He stayed, Mark. Wes stayed. And he put the camera down.”
Finn sucked in a breath as if bracing himself for what came next.
“And for the first time in the years I’ve known you, I watched you reach for something.” His voice cracked, just slightly. “And then, this afternoon, you talked yourself back out of it with a number. You came in here looking like a man at a funeral, and you want me to tell you that you did the sensible thing.”
“I did do the sensible thing. We live—”
“You did thesafething, Mark. They’re not the same, and you of all people know they’re not, because you build things, and you know the difference between a wall that’s load-bearing and a wall that’sjust there to hide the room behind it.” He stood, too restless to continue sitting. “The math’s not wrong, and that’s what’s killing me. Your math is perfect, just like always. Tampa’s real. The company’s real. Lisbon’s real. The distance is real. You didn’t lie to him about a single figure, but you used true things to build a wall. You’re standing behind it right now, telling me it’s for your own protection. I am telling you it is not protecting you, Mark; it is just keeping you alone.”
I didn’t say anything.
There was nothing to say.
He was right, and he knew he was right, and I knew he was right.
“Here’s the part you’ve not let yourself do the math on,” he went on, quieter now. “You ran every number on what you’d lose. Your life’s bolted to Tampa, fine, but you never once ran the numbers on what it costs to be right. You’re going to fly home tomorrow, and you’re going to be correct. You’re going to besocorrect. You’ll have the company and the crews and the half-framed house and every single thing you measured. You’ll lie in your own bed in your own city being completely, defensibly, sensibly correct . . . and you’ll miss him so badly you won’t be able to breathe. I’ve watched you be alone for years. I know what it looks like on you. I’d hoped to GodI’d never watch you actually choose it.”
“He never asked me to move,” I said, and it came out smaller than I meant it. “He’d never ask.”
“No. He wouldn’t. He’s spent his whole life never landing anywhere, and he’s not about to ask another man to be the ground for him.” Finn shook his head. “But you didn’t ask him either, did you? You both sat in that cove being noble at each other, two grown men so busy protecting one another from ‘the ask’ that neither of you made it.” He spread his hands. “Did it occur to you, even once, that the man owns his whole life in two bags? Did you even think that his job is one a person can do from anywhere there’s light? Did you runthatnumber, or did you only run the ones that let you off the hook?”
I stared at him.
I had not run that number.
I’d run every number that kept me safe and not the single one that didn’t. I’d called the result sensible, and I’d done it so smoothly I hadn’t even noticed I was making a choice. I was a man who measured everything, and I’d left the most important figure off the page—on purpose—because some part of me was more afraid of the math working out than of it failing.
“There it is,” Finn said softly, watching my face. For once he didn’t grin when he said it. “There’s thelook. You just found the number you skipped, didn’t you?”
“It’s not that simple.”
He laughed, though there was little humor in it. “No, of course not. It’s not simple at all. It’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and it might still fall apart, and you might get your heart broken in a way you can’t measure or repair. That’s the whole point, you great gray idiot. That’s what the big kind of love is. It’s the thing you can’t see, the math you can’t compute, and you do it anyway.”
He sat back down, clearly wrung out, and gave me a tired, hopeful little smile. “I love you, you know. It’s the friend kind, the brotherly love, the kind that turned out right. I have spent years waiting for you to find a man who’d look at you the way that bloke looks at you. You finally found him, Mark, and he’s two hundred yards from this room right now packing a camera bag and telling himself the sensible answer is the right answer, same as you.”
He let that hang for a moment, then added, “The van comes at ten.”
I looked at the clock.
It was nearly midnight.
“The van comes at ten,” I repeated.
“Ten in the morning, to be clear, which gives you all night to keep being correct.” He picked his drinkback up, having said the things he’d clearly been thinking since he saw my face. “Or it gives you about ten hours to do the bravest bit of arithmetic of your life. It’s your call, big guy. I’m only the safety blanket, remember?” He grinned for the first time in forever and took a sip. “The rest was always going to be you.”
I sat on the edge of the bed in a room that smelled like flowers, in a country I hadn’t wanted to come to, holding a bottle of water a freckled Irishman had handed me instead of a drink because he knew I’d need to think straight, and I did the number I’d skipped.
I ran it three times.
It came out the same way every time, the way the true ones do.
“Finn,” I said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“What room is he in?”
