Page 77 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

Another silence. This one is different from the first — less charged, more tired. The fight has moved through us and left something else in its place. Not resolution. Not forgiveness. Something more honest than either of those things.

"I'm not okay with this," Caleb says.

"I want you to know that. I'm not giving you my blessing or whatever you're looking for."

"I'm not looking for your blessing."

"Good." He picks up his jacket from where he dropped it on the back of the chair. He pulls it on. He looks at me one more time — and in that look is everything we are to each other. Brothers who grew up in the same house and became strangers and are standing in a room together trying to find the language for something that doesn't have clean language yet.

"I need sometime," he says.

"Take it," I say.

He walks to the door. He opens it. He pauses with his hand on the frame without turning back.

"You’re a son of a bitch, Logan," he says quietly.

Then he leaves. The door closes behind him.

I stand in the apartment for a long time after he's gone. The scotch is still on the counter where I left it. I walk to the window and I look out at the city below.I said it out loud.

I've been carrying it for months — letting it exist somewhere below articulation, something I knew the shape of without giving it its name. And then Caleb was standing there with his rage and I opened my mouth and the truth came out before I'd decided to say it.

I love her.

Three words. The most accurate three words I've put together in ten years. I hear them in the silence of this penthouse and I don't flinch from them. I don't reach for anything to soften the weight of them.

I think about Giselle. Not the way I've thought about her for the past decade — not as a verdict, not as proof of something irreparable in me. I think about her clearly, from a distance that time has finally created. We were two people who made each other into something neither of us intended. She needed more than I knew how to give. I gave what I had and it wasn't enough and we both paid for that.

But Sutton is not that story. She has never once asked me to be less than I am. She has never needed managing or appeasing or careful handling. She shows up every dayat full capacity and she asks for the same in return. She called me out in my own office when I was wrong. She walked into a room full of my world and made it her own. She looked at me in a hotel corridor in New York and didn't look away.

I have been punishing her for a failure that belongs to a different time and a different version of myself. That ends tonight.

I pick up my phone. I get my jacket. I call the car.

The drive to Pacific Heights takes twelve minutes. I know the building — my driver has pulled up in front of it more times than I've counted. I've sat in the back of this car and watched her walk through that door and then driven away. Every time I told myself the distance was correct. Every time I was lying.

The car stops at the curb. I sit for a moment looking at the building. The lights are on — several floors, no way to know which are hers. I pick up my phone. I call her.

She answers on the second ring.

"Logan?"

"Are you home?" I say.

A pause. "Yes. What's going on?"

"Are you alone?"

Another pause. Longer.

"My roommate's out of town." Her voice shifts — alert now, careful.

"Logan. What's happening? Are you okay?"

"I'm downstairs," I say.

"I need to see you. What floor?"