5. Eve #2
“It’s enough to get him fired, and then arrested.
” He closes the laptop, and suddenly his eyes are on me instead of the screen, dark and serious in the lamplight.
“The man who runs that company is an old family friend of ours. Hates a scandal more than he ever liked a Valentine. He’d want to know what Simon’s been doing with his money. Somebody could make sure he found out.”
“You’d burn your own brother.”
“He burned himself.” The muscle in his jaw again. “I’m just going to make sure the fire spreads to the right rooms.”
I look at him. Really look. Five years I’ve known this man, Simon’s quieter brother, the family disappointment, the one Hilda only acknowledged at dinner to ask pointed questions about his career and his love life. My friend. Made of something a great deal stronger than I ever bothered to notice.
“Why are you helping me?” I ask. “And don’t say loyalty. You walked out of your brother’s wedding to catch me before I hit the floor. That’s not loyalty. That’s something else.”
He goes still.
“Because you deserved better.” His voice drops, roughens at the edges.
“Because I watched you spend years trying to be enough for him, and he never earned a single second of it. Because every family dinner I sat across from you while he checked his phone under the table, and I thought, if that were mine, I would never look at anything else.”
“Dean.”
“And because watching you walk down that aisle today.” He stops.
His throat works. “Was the hardest thing I have ever done. And I have buried a grandmother and signed away an inheritance and let my own mother tell me I was a disappointment to my face. And none of it was as hard as standing at that altar watching you walk toward my brother.”
The room has gone very quiet. The whiskey, the laptops, the felonies, all of it falls away.
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” I whisper.
“Because you were happy. Or I thought you were. And because I’m his brother. What does it make a man, wanting what his brother has.” A bleak almost-smile. “Turns out, the one who was right about him the whole time. For whatever that’s worth.”
I should let it go. Smart money says I focus on the revenge, on the catharsis of watching Simon’s whole life come down. That’s the move.
Instead I reach out before I’ve decided to. My hand finds his on the floor between us, and he freezes under my touch.
“Thank you,” I say, and it cracks down the middle. “For catching me. At the church. When she.”
My throat closes around the rest.
He turns his hand over. Threads his fingers through mine, slow, deliberate, like he’s giving me every chance to pull away. His palm is warm, a little rough, and it fits against mine in a way that I feel in my chest and lower, and I don’t pull away.
“I’ll always catch you, Eve.”
The moment stretches. His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there, and my breath snags, and the room shrinks down to the eight inches of space between us and the heat of his hand around mine. His thumb moves once across my knuckles. I feel it everywhere.
And just like that I’m somewhere else. Five years ago. A different night, a different version of me, before Simon had ever said a word to me.
A charity fundraiser in a downtown hotel ballroom, string quartet and food too small to eat, a ticket I could never have afforded if a college friend hadn’t been working the door and waved me in for the free champagne.
I’d escaped to the balcony because I’d just laughed so hard at something a stranger in a good suit said that wine came out my nose in front of a woman in real diamonds, and I needed to go die somewhere with a view.
And then the stranger was there too, leaning on the rail with his tie loose, looking like he’d followed me out to make sure I survived the mortification.
“You’re the one who laughed at the ice sculpture,” he said.
“It was a swan eating a smaller swan. Someone had to.”
“The committee’s very proud of that swan. It’s supposed to be a swan protecting a cygnet.”
“Oh my God.” I’d put my hand over my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s the most honest thing in the room.” And he’d grinned, and that was it, that was the whole beginning of it, except it wasn’t a beginning at all because the timing turned out to be a coward.
We talked for hours, about nothing and everything.
About the constellations neither of us could actually name and our worst first dates and why rich people insist on serving food you need tweezers to eat.
He listened like the answers mattered. He laughed at the things I actually thought were funny instead of the things I was supposed to say.
I didn’t even get his last name that night. Just Dean.
And at the end of the night, he insisted on driving me home, because a woman who’d just survived public death by ice sculpture shouldn’t have to flag down a cab. He walked me up to my door and stopped there on the step, under the porch light, and looked at me with these same dark eyes.
“I had a good time tonight,” he said.
“Me too.”
His gaze had dropped to my mouth, the way it just did. Mine had dropped to his. The space between us had gone thin and charged, and for one second the whole rest of my life tilted toward him.
Then his phone rang. Some family emergency, I’d learn much later, one of Simon’s messes.
He apologized, took the call, and the moment folded itself up and went quiet.
He called three days later, like he promised, and we became friends instead, easy and fast, the kind that feels like it always existed.
I told myself friends was what I wanted.
I was twenty-two and a coward, and I let the almost-kiss turn into a story I never told anyone.
It was more than a year before he brought me by his family’s place one afternoon, back when he still lived there, and I met the brother.
Simon, all charm and certainty, wanting me in a way that seemed to cost him nothing at all.
And I let myself get swept into it, because Dean was my friend by then and friends was safe, and I never once let myself wonder what would have happened if that phone hadn’t rung on a balcony.
I’m such an idiot. Three of them spent loving the wrong brother.
The flutter from that night is back now, inconvenient and insane and undeniable.
His phone buzzes on the floor.
The sound breaks the moment clean in half. He pulls back, checks it, and his expression goes dark.
“Simon. He noticed the honeymoon got canceled.” A grim almost-smile.
“He’s taking it about as well as you’d expect.
Four texts and a voicemail. He’s blaming the travel agent.
” He scrolls, and one eyebrow climbs. “He’s also blaming, let me read this directly, the Mormons.
And someone called, quote, the cat people.
He says his phone hasn’t stopped ringing in two days.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses came by twice. He’s apparently signed up for a furry convention newsletter and something called Cat Facts, and he cannot make any of it stop. ”
He looks up at me, slow delight spreading across his face.
“Eve. Did you sign my brother up for Cat Facts.”
“I plead the Fifth.”
“Did you sign him up for a religion.”
“Three religions. It was a long afternoon and I had a lot of feelings.”
He laughs, the real one, helpless and delighted, and the knot in my chest that’s been clenched since the church loosens half a turn.
“Good.” I knock back the last of the whiskey, and the petty little glow of it is so much better than crying. “Let’s give him something bigger to cry about than Cat Facts. Show me how to dismantle a man.”
We work until the sky outside starts thinking about morning.
Downloading evidence. Writing the message that would put all of this in front of the one man who could end him.
Mapping the whole collapse out in screenshots and carefully worded tips for exactly the right people.
Dean is methodical in a way that surprises me, building each piece so it can’t be traced back, thinking three moves ahead like he’s done this in his head a hundred times.
“You’re frighteningly good at this,” I tell him around two.
“I’ve spent my whole life watching how my family destroys people. I paid attention.” He doesn’t look up. “Figured one day it might be useful to know the moves.”
Somewhere in there he tells me, almost offhand, that he’s been quietly building something of his own. Won’t say what. Says it like a man guarding a candle from the wind, like he’s afraid saying it out loud will jinx it.
“Just tell me it’s legal,” I say.
“Extremely legal. Aggressively legal. The most boring dream you can imagine.” But he smiles when he says it, a real one, and for the first time all night he’s looking at the future instead of the wreckage, and I find I want to see what he’s making.
I tuck it away, this small bright thing, the first piece of Dean that has nothing to do with Simon at all.
By the time it’s all assembled, everything Simon spent a year burying sits packaged and lethal on the floor between us, pointed at every person with the power to end him.
The evidence aimed at the people who matter.
The photos ready for every wall in that building.
All of it set to go off while the city sleeps.
Dean sits back on his heels and looks at me, and there’s a question in the look. Last chance to flinch.
I don’t flinch.
“Light it,” I say.
He does.