6. Best Friends Brother, Worst Timing
BEST FRIEND'S brOTHER, WORST TIMING
Ethan
I've managed boardrooms full of men who wanted to take things from me. I've managed hostile press, and one custody attorney who bills by the six-minute increment. I can manage my sister's apartment for two hours.
I know Lani will be there. Maya mentioned it the way Maya mentions everything, like information is weather. Oh, and I invited Lani. You've met her, right? She seems to like the job.
I said yes to dinner because saying no requires a reason, and reasons are doors.
Lily is having her own night. Harper is making homemade pizza at the penthouse, Lily's favorite tradition, where she puts so much cheese on her half that the crust collapses. Harper texted me a photo before I left. Lily covered in flour, holding up a tomato sauce can like a trophy.
I was about to cancel this dinner three times today.
The custody hearing is coming. Malcolm's voice is in my head.
Invisible. Boring. Two hours at my sister's apartment shouldn't be a risk.
Two hours at my sister's apartment with the woman I slept with in Maui who ended up in my office is a different kind of math.
But Maya only asks questions when I do something abnormal.
So, I'm here. Standing outside her building in the November cold, looking up at the lit windows on the fourth floor, giving myself thirty seconds to be a person before I go up and perform being fine.
Thirty seconds.
Then I go in.
Maya's apartment smells like garlic and wine, and the warmth of a person who cooks. She opens the door talking, moving, mid-story about a cab driver who tried to charge her twenty dollars extra for her tote bag.
“It's a tote bag,” she says, handing me a glass of red. “Not luggage. I don't care how many succulents are in it.”
“How many succulents are in it?”
“That's not the point.”
She steers me inside, and I see Lani.
She's at the kitchen counter with a glass of white wine, mid-laugh when I walk in. Dark green wrap top. Hair down, loose and curly the way it was in Maui. She looks at home in my sister's kitchen, and it hits hard.
She sees me. The laugh finishes at its own pace, and then she looks at me with an expression that gives away nothing and everything.
“Ethan.” Polite. Professional.
“Lani.” Same.
Maya looks between us with satisfaction. She has no idea.
She seats us across from each other. Of course she does.
The food is good. The wine is better. Maya runs the conversation with warmth and speed, and no regard for anyone who might want a pause. She's been like this since we were kids. I used to find it exhausting. Tonight I'm grateful for it, because it means I don't have to talk.
Lani is different here. At the office she's precise. Controlled. Here she's quick and easy, and she laughs without calculating it first. She and Maya finish each other's points. They argue about a restaurant that closed two years ago with the conviction of people settling old scores.
I say nothing for the first twenty minutes, and neither of them notices. I am watching two people who have ten years of shared language, and I am not part of it.
Then Maya brings up the Castellan account and asks Lani how she's finding the work.
“It's fine,” Lani says. “Organized chaos with good coffee.”
“That's the nicest thing anyone has said about that office.”
“I'm being generous.”
I reach for the bread. “The coffee is adequate.”
Lani looks at me. “You've had two cups before nine every morning this week.”
“Adequate doesn't mean unwelcome.”
“That's a specific defense of mediocre coffee.”
Maya points her fork between us. “See, this is what I imagined. Productive tension.”
Lani smiles and looks at her plate. I look at mine.
But for a second it was there. The sharpness we had in Maui. Maya read it as hostility. That's safer.
My phone buzzes at 8:15 p.m.
Harper. Lily wants to say goodnight. She's been doing this more since the custody filing, like she can feel the tension, even when I'm careful around her.
I excuse myself and step to the bedroom, closing the door. Maya's apartment is small and the walls are thin, and Lily's voice carries even on a small screen.
Lily's face fills the screen.
Star pajamas. Bun, the stuffed rabbit she named at two and has since decided the name has too much history to change. Hair wild, the clip from this morning long gone.
“Daddy.”
“Hey, bug.” My voice changes. It always does. “Why are you still up?”
“Harper said five more minutes.” She holds Bun to the camera. “Bun wanted to say night too.”
“Tell Bun I said night.”
She delivers the message in a serious whisper, then turns back. “Daddy, will you be home when I wake up?”
“I'll be there, bug. I promise.”
She nods. Satisfied with my promises the way she's always been. I would do anything to keep that trust.
“Love you, Daddy.”
“Love you more.”
The call ends.
I stand there with my phone in my hand and the noise of the dinner party behind the door.
Then I open the door and go back to the table.
Lani isn't at the table.
I hear her in the kitchen with Maya. Water running, dishes clinking, the two of them laughing.
I sit back down. Pour more wine I'm not going to drink. The bedroom door was closed. The walls are thicker than I remember. There's no way she heard anything.
Maya comes back with dessert plates.
Lani follows a minute later. Wine glass in hand. She's rigid in a way I haven't seen before. The stillness of someone who heard something and is deciding what to do with it.
She sets her glass down and takes her seat.
The evening moves on.
Maya disappears into the kitchen with the empty wine bottle. The table goes to two. The candles burning low.
Lani looks at me.
“Do you have kids?”
Conversational. Like she's asking about the traffic.
But she's heard the answer.
I know it in her eyes. The steadiness. She heard Lily through the door, or she heard Daddy through the kitchen wall, or she put together a dozen small things from her first week and is asking me to confirm what she knows.
One second to decide.
Malcolm's voice. Nothing personal. Nothing visible. Tessa's lawyer would use anything.
“No,” I say.
She holds my gaze. One beat. Two. Her expression doesn't change.
“Right,” she says.
That word. Right. Almost gentle. Worse than anger.
Maya comes back with tiramisu, and the moment dissolves.
I stay for forty more minutes. I eat the tiramisu. I lose an argument about a film I haven't seen. I watch Lani make my sister laugh three times, and I keep my face where it needs to be.
At the door, Maya hugs me. Tells me to text when I'm home. Standard since we were teenagers, and she decided she was the responsible one.
I step into the hall and wait for the elevator.
Behind me, through the open door, I hear Lani say something and Maya laugh, full and bright, and then the sound of a hug. The easy kind. Between people who are home with each other.
The elevator arrives.
I step in.
I tell myself the lie was necessary. Lily's privacy is everything. The custody hearing is close. One crack in the wall and the whole thing comes down.
She isn't a stranger. That's the problem.
The doors close.
I don't believe myself. Not even a little.
Harper has sent a final photo. Lily asleep on the couch, Bun under her arm, half a pizza crust on the plate next to her. Asleep before the movie started.
I save the photo. Put my phone away.
I lied about her tonight.
I'm going to have to live with that.