14. Wes
— ? —
Wes
The first time I saw Paige, my father was telling the fish joke.
Thanksgiving, twelve years ago - first family holiday since Mom’s all-clear, the house loud with gratitude and too much wine - and Cole walks in with a woman in a burgundy sweater and a ponytail, nothing like the polished, careful ones he usually brought around, and Dad is already mid-setup because Dad reads no rooms.
“-so the fish looks at him,” my father says, “and the fish says, one. Two. THREE.”
Silence. The joke has no other parts. It has never had other parts.
And this woman throws her head back and laughs with her whole chest - loud, unguarded, tears-at-the-corners laughing - and grabs my father’s arm and says, “Wait. Tell it again. Do the fish voice again,” and Dad, who has waited thirty years for this audience, tells it again, and Mom mouths I love her at Cole across the gravy.
“Isn’t she unreal?” Cole says to me, low, glowing, the proudest I’ve ever heard my brother sound about anything he didn’t buy.
“Yeah,” I said, and picked up the carving knife, and gave myself a job to do with my hands.
That was the whole of it. One laugh, one Thanksgiving, and every family dinner for twelve years after - her across the table, her nose crinkling, me training myself not to look when anyone might be watching, dating good women who deserved better than a man with one eye always on the door.
I never acted on it. Not once. I built a whole life around the not-acting, the way you frame a house around a load-bearing wall.
There was one night I almost broke.
Two years into their marriage. Cole was traveling for work, and Paige called me because her car wouldn’t start and she needed to get to the airport to pick up her parents. I drove to her house, fixed the battery terminal - loose connection, ten-minute job - and when I was done, she hugged me.
Just a hug. A normal, grateful, sister-in-law hug.
But she’d been baking something, and she smelled like vanilla and sugar, and her body was soft and warm against mine, and for five endless seconds I let myself hold her. Let myself imagine. Let myself want.
When she pulled back, her cheeks were flushed, and she laughed - nervous, breathless - and said, “Sorry, I’m a hugger.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
It wasn’t fine. I drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel, and I sat in my driveway for twenty minutes, hating myself for wanting my brother’s wife.
Hating Cole for having her and not treasuring her.
Hating the whole goddamn situation that put her in my arms for five seconds and made me feel more alive than I had in years.
That was when I started keeping my distance. Religiously. Making sure I was never alone with her, never touched her, never gave my traitorous heart any ammunition.
And I hated myself for the relief I felt when she and Cole couldn’t conceive.
Because that meant she wasn’t tied to him. Not completely. That meant she could still escape.
Now I’m standing in my grandmother’s living room, three weeks after the vow renewal, watching Paige navigate a roomful of people who don’t know whose side to take.
Grandma Rose died three days ago. Ninety-two years old, went in her sleep, the kind of death everyone says they want but no one is ever ready for.
The funeral was this morning - closed casket, hymns I don’t remember the words to, a eulogy I gave because no one else in my family can string two sentences together without crying.
Paige came because I asked her to.
“I need you there,” I told her in my kitchen, the night before the service. “I can’t stand next to Cole and pretend we’re family right now. Not without you.”
She didn’t hesitate. “I’ll be there.”
She’s wearing a black dress, simple and knee-length, with low heels that make her almost as tall as Cole. Her hair is down, falling in soft waves around her face, and she looks exhausted - the kind of bone-deep tired that comes from two weeks of not sleeping through the night.
I know because she hasn’t been back to that hotel since the storm.
I drove her to my place that night, put her in the guest room, and neither of us has said a word about her leaving.
So I hear it, down the hall, every night.
The nightmares wake her up screaming, and I lie in my own bed listening to her breathe, wanting to go to her, not letting myself.
Across the living room, Cole holds court by the photo table, a whiskey he isn’t drinking in one hand and our grandmother’s memory in the other. He keeps looking at Paige. Then at me. Tracking the distance between us like a man calculating a threat.
I find her in the hallway outside the downstairs bathroom, pressing her palms against her eyes.
“Hey.” I keep my voice soft. “You okay?”
She drops her hands. Her eyes are red-rimmed, but not from tears - from exhaustion, or maybe from the effort of not crying. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. Everyone’s looking at me like I’m either a victim or a villain, and I can’t tell which is worse.”
“You’re here because I asked you to be. That’s enough.”
“Is it?” She laughs, a little broken. “Your aunt Margaret told me I look ‘thin.’ She said it like an accusation. Like I’ve been starving myself to punish Cole.”
“Aunt Margaret also told me my grandmother would be disappointed in my haircut. She’s not a reliable narrator.”
Paige smiles, just barely. In the dim hallway, with her back against the wallpaper and her eyes still shadowed, she looks like something fragile that everyone keeps forgetting to handle carefully.
I want to touch her so badly my hands ache.
She steps closer. In the narrow hallway, there’s nowhere for me to go - my back hits the wall opposite hers, and suddenly we’re two feet apart, and I can smell her shampoo, something floral and clean, and I’m losing my mind.
Her hand comes up to rest on my chest. Right over my heart.
She has to feel it hammering. Has to feel the way my whole body goes rigid at her touch, the way twelve years of carefully maintained distance collapse into nothing the moment her palm presses against me.
I stop breathing.
Her fingers are warm through my shirt. Her eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted and looking at me like I’m something solid in a world that just fell apart.
And I want - God, I want so badly it’s a physical ache - to pull her against me, to wrap my arms around her, to tell her she never has to go back to him.
And under that, uglier and hungrier, the thought I’ve spent twelve years refusing to finish: backing her into this wallpaper, finding out if her mouth is as soft as it looks, learning what sound she makes when a man kisses her and means it.
At my grandmother’s funeral. With her palm over my heart and my brother twenty feet away.
I’m going to hell.
But she’s not mine. She’s never been mine. And if I move, if I do anything other than stand here like a statue, I’ll do something I can’t take back.
My hands stay at my sides. My heart pounds against her palm. And I hold absolutely still while every cell in my body screams at me to close the distance between us.
“Wes.” Cole’s voice comes from behind us. “Can I talk to you? Alone?”
Paige’s hand drops. The moment shatters like glass.
“No,” I say without turning around.
“It’s about the family. Five minutes.”
I look at Paige. She nods slightly - go, I’m fine - but her eyes are saying something else. Something like be careful.
I follow Cole to Grandma Rose’s study. The room still smells like her - lavender and old books and the peppermints she kept in her desk drawer. I spent hours in here as a kid, listening to her tell stories about the family, learning how to carve wood on a piece of scrap pine.
The door barely closes before Cole turns on me.
“You think you’re going to get her, don’t you?” His voice is low, vicious. “You think this is your chance.”
“This isn’t about Paige.”
“Everything is about Paige.” He steps closer. “It’s always been about Paige, for both of us. I know what you’re doing. Patient, honorable Wes, waiting in the wings. You’ve been waiting twelve years for me to fuck up badly enough that she’d notice you.”
I keep my voice even. “I’ve been waiting twelve years for you to be the man she thought she married.”
“And now that I’m not, you’re going to swoop in? You’re going to be her hero? Save her from the big bad cheater and ride off into the sunset?”
“I’m going to be whatever she needs me to be. And right now, that’s someone who tells her the truth.”
Cole laughs. It’s the same ugly sound he made at the construction site - sharp and bitter and full of something that looks a lot like fear.
“The truth? You want truth?” He leans in, close enough that I can smell the whiskey on his breath.
“You broke off your engagement to Sarah Mitchell because you were in love with my wife. You’ve spent twelve years pining for a woman who chose me.
And now you’re going to pretend you’re the good guy because you kept your hands to yourself? ”
The words land like punches. Because there’s truth in them - ugly, partial truth that Cole has always been good at weaponizing.
Sarah and I were engaged for six months.
She was kind and smart and exactly right for me on paper.
And I broke it off three weeks before the wedding because I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Paige looked at Christmas dinner, the light from the tree catching in her hair while she laughed at one of Dad’s jokes.
Sarah deserved better than a man who was in love with his brother’s wife. So I ended it.
Cole was the only one who figured out why.
“Maybe,” I say. “But I’m not the one who spent twelve years fucking her best friend. I’m not the one who made her a punchline at her own vow renewal. Whatever I’ve done or haven’t done, I’ve never made her feel like a fool.”
Cole’s expression shifts. Something darker moving under the surface, something that looks almost like calculation.
“You think you’ve won something,” he says quietly. “You haven’t. I’ll make sure of it.”
He walks out before I can respond, and I’m left standing in Grandma Rose’s study, breathing in lavender and peppermints, knowing that this isn’t over.
It’s barely begun.