22. Kane #2
“—actually, Mum called me twice this week,” Sloane says, leaning forward, the attention shifting into exasperation.
“Twice, Kane. Two voicemails. She wants everyone at the table for her birthday dinner and she’s already catastrophising about the seating plan and whether you’re going to bring work to the table again.
She literally said—“ She does our mother’s voice, a pitch I recognize from years of being called down to dinner, “—tell your brother that laptops are not a condiment—”
She’s laughing. Actually laughing, the head-thrown-back version, and the moment closes around her laughter the way a door settles shut on its own, and the words I was building go back into their container.
Not yet.
I look back at my screen.
“I won’t bring the laptop,” I say.
“Tell her that. She doesn’t believe me.” Sloane pulls out her phone, still smiling. “I’m going to text her right now that you said it so there’s a record.” She’s already typing. “Birthday dinner. No laptop. Binding verbal contract, witnessed by me.”
“Witnessed by you is not legally binding.”
“I’ll notarize it myself.” When she finishes typing she looks up, and grins before standing. She collects her coffee cup and the bakery bag in one motion, already checking her phone. At the elevator she turns back, the expression she gets when she’s going to say something she actually means.
“The jaw thing,” she says. “Whatever it is you’re not saying.” She holds my gaze. “When you’re ready.”
The elevator doors open.
“Goodnight, Sloane.”
“It’s morning.”
“Still.”
She steps in, still smiling. The doors close on her face, the grin, the sharp eyes, the look of a woman who knows she’s seeing part of the picture and has decided, for now, to let it be. The lobby indicator clicks on.
She’s gone.
I stay at the desk, staring at the revisions.
When you’re ready.
The almost-telling sitting in my chest alongside it — not relief that the moment passed, just the weight of a thing that keeps not happening. I put the pencil down and go to the bedroom.
Vera is sitting on the edge of the bed with her knees pulled to her chest. She looks up when I appear in the doorway.
“She’s gone,” I say.
“I heard.” She uncurls slowly. “I heard almost all of it.” She waits until I look at her. “Kane. You started to tell her.”
“I didn’t.”
“You started to. What stopped you?”
I lean in the doorway. “She started talking about Mum. The moment passed.”
Vera looks at me for a long moment, weighing something she’s not ready to file away yet.
“She said when you’re ready,” Vera says. “At the elevator.”
“I know.”
“She already knows something is there.”
“She knows I’m not telling her something.” I cross to her.
Vera tips her head back as I stop in front of her, and her face is doing the honest thing, the unguarded version, the one that lives in Sunday mornings and gray henleys and almond croissants, the one that costs her something real to let me see.
I frame her face in my hands. “Next week.” The word lands differently than I intend it to.
Not a gift of time. A deadline. And we both know how much it costs to keep extending it.
She reads my face. Her expression shifts — not hurt, not pressure. Just quiet acknowledgment: the window’s been open a long time, and it won’t stay that way. “Okay.” Then, quieter: “This is the last time I’m saying okay.”
“Yeah.”
“She said I seem lighter.” Her voice is quiet. Not performing anything. “Is that true? From where you are?”
I look at her. She’s gone still, asking a real question and waiting for a real answer.
“Yes,” I say.
She holds that for a moment.
Then she reaches up, wraps her fingers around my wrists, not pulling my hands away, holding them there. “Go get my coffee. You left it in the kitchen.”
“You could get it yourself.”
“I could. But I won’t.”
I look at her for a moment. “You know you’re impossible.”
“You knew that before you got me almond croissants.” The corner of her mouth lifts. “Sir.”
The title in this context, bedroom doorway, Sunday morning, her sitting on my bed, does what it always does.
“Don’t start something,” I say.
She grins. The real one.
I turn and go get her coffee.
When I return, I hold out the cup.
She reaches for it.
I pull it back an inch, and her eyes come up to mine.
“Gerald,” I say.
Her mouth presses together. The effort of it visible in the corners. She is approximately three seconds from losing the battle entirely.
“I don’t know what—“
“You named me after my cactus.”
“Gerald is a classic name.” Her voice is admirably steady.
I look at her. She looks back.
“Sounds like a solid name,” she says, dropping into a register that is apparently meant to be me. Flat. Measured. Deeply serious about a succulent. “Very dependable.”
I hand her the coffee. Then I sit on the edge of the bed, and lean in until my mouth is close to her ear.
“Keep it up,” I say quietly, “and your ass is going to meet something very solid.”
She pulls back just far enough to look at me. Her mouth curls into a grin that’s wide, unguarded and completely hers.
“Is that a threat or a promise, Sir.”
I kiss her. Not brief. Not particularly gentle either.
She has her answer.