Chapter 23 Brother At The
Marina
Bishop
Cole shows up on a Wednesday.
No call ahead. No text. Just his truck in the marina lot at ten in the morning when I'm reviewing the winter maintenance contracts and the last thing I need is my brother walking through the door.
He walks through the door.
I hear him before I see him, his voice in the main office, easy and warm, the particular register Cole uses when he's genuinely glad to be somewhere. A register I haven't heard aimed at me in a long time. I hear Delilah's voice answer. Lower than his. Careful in a way she isn't with customers, isn't with Margo, isn't even with me anymore now that we've stopped pretending the professional distance is natural.
Careful the way you are with someone you've already had the hard conversation with and haven't quite finished having it.
I come out of my office.
Cole is standing at the operations desk with his hands in his jacket pockets and the specific look on his face that I've been seeing my whole life relief, the particular relief of someone who has been carrying worry long enough that seeing the thing they were worried about, intact and functioning, loosens something they'd been holding tight without realizing.
He looks at Delilah like that.
Then he looks at me.
The relief doesn't leave. But something else moves into his expression careful, watchful, the look Cole gets when he's taking inventory of a room and finding more in it than he expected. He looks at me in the doorway. Looks at Delilah at the desk. Looks at the space between us not dramatically, not like he's making an accusation, just the way my brother has always looked at things. Like he's filing the geometry.
He doesn't say anything about it.
He crosses the room and pulls me into the hug we've been giving each other for fifteen years brief, hard, a hand on the back of the neck. The hug that says everything we don't.
"You look like you haven't slept since July," he says. "Good to see you too."
He pulls back. Looks at me for a moment longer than a greeting requires.
I hold his gaze.
Whatever he finds there he chooses not to address directly. He turns back to Delilah.
"You're really working here." Not an accusation. The tone of a man confirming something he already knew but needed to see to believe.
"Operations coordinator." She holds up the vendor contract. "Four weeks in."
"And you're" He stops. "You’re, okay? Actually okay, not the version people say when they mean the opposite?"
"Actually okay." She says it steadily. "Better than okay."
Cole looks at her.
I watch him do it the same inventory he took of me, but longer, more thorough. He's looking for the specific things he looks for when he's checking on someone he loves. The quality of her eyes. The way she's holding herself. Whether the okay she's offering has the texture of something real or something performed.
He finds what he's looking for.
"Good." He says it like a conclusion he's satisfied with. "That's actually good."
He pulls out the chair across from her desk my chair, the one I sit in for the weekly operations review, the one I've started sitting in more often than the job requires and drops into it like he owns it.
I stay in the doorway.
"I was furious," Cole says. Conversational. Like he's reporting a fact. "When you vanished. I want you to know that."
"I know," Delilah says.
"Twenty-three calls."
"I know the number."
"My mom cried." He pauses. "I'm not trying to guilt you. I just want the record accurate."
"Twenty-three," she says. "I know the actual number."
Something moves across Cole's face. He looks at his hands for a moment. Then back at her.
"How do you know the actual number?"
A beat. Just long enough.
"I saw my phone when it powered back on," she says. Steady. "It's a hard number to forget."
Cole holds her gaze for a moment.
Then he nods. Slow. The nod of a man who has decided something and isn't going to push further not today, not in this room, not with whatever else he's already noticed and filed.
"Okay," he says. "We don't have to do all of it today." He sits back. "I just needed to see you. Make sure you're actually fine and not running some kind of fine performance for my benefit."
"I'm not performing."
"Yeah." He looks at her for another beat. "Yeah, I can see that."
The thing about Cole is he means what he says. He's not managing her. Not handling the situation. He looked at her, took her in, decided she was telling the truth, and moved on. The anger is real and it will come back they'll have the full conversation eventually, in a different room, without me in the doorway. But right now, his relief is bigger and Cole has always been honest about which thing is biggest.
I watch this from the doorway and feel territorial and guilty in equal, uncomfortable measure.
Territorial because he's sitting in my chair at her desk like it's nothing. Like this is easy. Like the space between Delilah and me is just a room he walked into and not something I've been navigating carefully for four weeks with the awareness of a man crossing ice.
Guilty because he has every right to that chair. Righter than I do, probably.
"How long are you in town?" I ask.
Cole looks at me. Like he's mildly surprised I'm still standing in the doorway.
"Through the weekend." He stretches his arms above his head. "Thought I'd do the lake thing. Get some air." He drops his arms. "Also, I wanted to check on both of you, but that's secondary and I'd prefer we all pretend it's primary."
"Cole"
"I'm kidding." He looks between us. "Mostly." He turns back to Delilah. "There's a group dinner Friday. Marcus and Jenna, the Kowalski couple, the usual crowd. You should come."
Delilah glances at me.
It's a small thing. Instinctive. A half-second check my face, my posture, whatever signal I might be giving about whether this is a good idea before she answers.
She shouldn't be checking with me.
I'm her supervisor. I'm not her anything else. And the glance is too quick and too natural and too much like the glance of someone who is used to factoring me in when she makes decisions, which means I've been factoring myself into her decisions whether either of us meant for that to happen.
Cole's eyes move between us.
Slow. Careful. The look of a man who just watched something happen and is deciding what it means.
I keep my face even.
Delilah says, "I'd love to."
"Great." Cole stands. Pushes the chair back in deliberate, I decide. Everything Cole does is deliberate. "Bishop. You should come too."
"I'll think about it."
"It's dinner."
"I said I'll think about it."
He holds my gaze for a moment.
There it is the thing he's been carrying since he walked in, the thing he's been turning over while he talked to Delilah and read the room and filed the geometry. He's looking at me with it now. Not asking. Just letting me know he has it.
I don't flinch.
He moves toward me. His hand lands on my shoulder brief, deliberate, the weight of fifteen years in it.
"Don't make it weird," he says.
Then he's past me and down the hall and out the back entrance and the door closes and the marina sounds come back in to fill the space he left.
I stand in the doorway.
Delilah is looking at her vendor contract.
Or she's looking at the vendor contract the way I look at the fuel dock logs when I'm actually watching her across the marina.
I don't ask which.
We both already know.