5. The Good Brother #3
Talia rested her hand on the edge of her tray. “My ruling,” she said, “is that your sister walks toward you like she expects to be caught if she stumbles.”
Something low in his chest tightened.
“She does,” he said.
“I know.”
For a second the dining room noise went muffled around him—the clatter of silverware, the low athlete laughter, the TV captions changing overhead.
Noah saw Sloane at fourteen in that school lobby.
Saw her this afternoon in the snow, telling him not to act surprised if nobody realized he was freezing.
Saw Talia in the seminar room, hearing a breath he hadn’t meant to let out and not using it against him.
He cut into his chicken just to have something to do with his hands. “She reads me too well.”
Talia’s mouth shifted, almost a smile. “That must be very difficult for you.”
“You have no idea.”
“I have several.”
He looked at her over the rim of his coffee. “You’re in a good mood.”
“No, I’m in a competent one.”
“Distinction without a difference.”
“Incorrect.”
Their eyes held for a beat too long.
Heat moved under his skin, quiet but immediate.
Nothing in the air around them changed visibly.
That was the worst part. The room stayed what it was—bright, public, full of bodies and routine—while every part of him became aware of the fact that Talia had watched him with his sister and seen not just the team version, not the smiling hallway buffer, but something more private.
Tenderness, maybe. The word felt dangerous.
He set his cup down. “How bad is your night?”
She glanced at the legal pad. “That depends on whether you’re asking professionally or as a man unsuccessfully pretending not to care.”
“Professionally,” he said.
Talia leaned back in her chair. “I’m reviewing documentation discrepancies.”
His jaw tightened before he could stop it.
She saw that too, of course she did. “And before you ask,” she said, “that is all I’m saying.”
He forced himself to keep eating. “Wasn’t going to ask.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Yeah.”
She folded her glasses and set them on the legal pad. Without them, her face looked sharper somehow, less shielded. “How is Cole?”
The question caught him.
He answered honestly before instinct could reroute it. “Scared.”
“And Dylan?”
“Trying to joke his way through it.”
“Also unsurprising.”
Noah nodded once. “They’re kids.”
“They’re adults in a system built to profit from calling them both, depending on the day.”
He looked at her.
There it was again, the thing under her rigor that people probably missed if they only saw the sharp edges: not cynicism. Anger, yes. Standards. But also care so disciplined it refused to disguise itself as kindness if kindness would muddy the line.
“You really do care what happens to them,” he said.
Talia held his gaze. “I care what happens to students when institutions decide convenience is the same thing as support.”
“And to me?”
The question slipped out before he could vet it.
He knew it the second it left his mouth—too naked, too direct, too much for a dining room where a swimmer two tables over was laughing hard enough to choke on pasta.
Talia went still.
Noah felt his pulse in his thumb, in the side of his throat, in the sore center of his chest where the day had apparently chosen to bruise him from the inside.
He could fix it. Joke. Pull back. He was excellent at that.
He did not.
Talia looked down once, then back up. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Also to you.”
The air shifted.
Noah stared at her. Whatever he had expected—deflection, a lecture, a refusal to indulge the question—that had not been it.
She had answered with the same stripped-down honesty she’d used in the seminar room, and because there was no performance in it, no flirtation dressing it up for safety, it went through him clean.
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
Talia’s fingers tightened briefly around her water glass before releasing it. “That does not change any of the facts,” she said.
“I know.”
“You being good to your sister does not make you right about everything.”
He almost smiled. “I know that too.”
“Good.”
“But it does make me right about some things.”
Her eyes narrowed faintly. “Competitive to the grave.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Former occupational hazard,” she corrected.
He leaned back. “Still counts.”
A soft huff of amusement escaped her. Barely there. Real enough to make his ribs feel too tight again.
At the far end of the room, one of the hockey freshmen called Noah’s name and lifted a hand. Noah lifted his own in answer without turning fully, instinctive, automatic. The kid grinned, reassured by nothing more than being seen, and went back to shoveling food into his face.
When Noah looked back, Talia was watching him.
“What?” he asked.
Her expression was unreadable for a beat. Then: “That.”
He knew exactly what she meant. The easy check-in. The constant scanning. The reflex to keep his people inside his field of vision.
He shrugged. “They had a hard week.”
“So did you.”
“Yeah.”
“And yet.”
He looked at the brownie tin. Its lid was dented at one corner from where he’d dropped it last year in a hotel hallway after an away loss nobody had deserved. He’d kept using it anyway.
“Sloane said something similar,” he admitted.
Talia’s brows lifted. “Should I be concerned you’re collecting women who tell you inconvenient truths?”
“It’s a hostile environment.”
“I’m sure.”
He ran his thumb along the edge of the tin. “She told me looking reliable isn’t the same thing as being honest.”
Talia did not speak right away.
Then, very carefully, “That seems like a useful distinction.”
He laughed under his breath. “You people are exhausting.”
“You people?”
“Women who know me too well.”
She tilted her head. “I know your habits.”
He met her eyes. “You keep saying that like it’s less dangerous.”
Something flashed there and was gone.
For one suspended moment the dining room seemed to draw back from them, not physically but in consequence.
The scrape of chairs and TV glow and silverware clink all kept happening, but they were suddenly beside it rather than in it, two people at a small table with too much truth already on the surface.
Then Talia’s phone buzzed against the table.
She looked down.
Noah saw the change before he knew the reason for it. Not fear. Not exactly. But a tightening, a severe gathering-in of focus that he recognized now because he had heard it in her voice through the seminar room door the night before.
She picked up the phone, read the screen, and went very still.
“What is it?” he asked.
Talia looked at him once, quickly, as if measuring what she could and could not say.
Then she stood.
“I have to take this.”
Her chair legs scraped hard against the floor. The legal pad, folder, glasses—she gathered them in one efficient sweep, all business now, all edges back in place. But not before he saw it, the thing underneath: the knowledge of impact, incoming.
“Doctor Shah.”
She paused.
Noah rose too, the old protective instinct already firing uselessly through his blood. “Is this about the ruling?”
A beat.
Her throat moved as she swallowed.
“I can’t discuss it here,” she said.
Not no.
Around them, dinner kept going. Someone laughed. The sports anchor on TV moved his mouth soundlessly beneath bright graphics