24. Kane
Hannigan’s is dark wood and leather booths, the comfortable hum of professionals unwinding after work. Classic rock plays low. I arrive at seven-twenty and settle into our corner booth, the one with good sight lines to the door.
I check my phone twice before he slides into the booth at seven-thirty.
“Maker’s Mark, neat,” he tells the server without looking at the menu. He’s never ordered anything else.
He looks easy in the way he always does between crises, shoulders settled, no urgency in the way he lifts his glass. He reads me in approximately four seconds.
“You’re distracted.”
“I’m fine.”
“Mmm.” He accepts his bourbon, takes a sip, studies me. “You’ve checked your phone three times since I sat down.”
“Work.”
“Right.” His tone says he doesn’t believe me for a second. “How is it? With Vera. Still calling it an arrangement?”
“No.”
He looks at me. Sets his glass down. “Since when?”
“Last week. We talked. Put a name to it.”
“Last week.” He says it without inflection. “And before that you were calling it an arrangement for what — a month?”
“Five weeks.”
“Five weeks of arrangement. And now it’s real.” He picks up his glass. “When are you telling Sloane?”
“We agreed. Soon.”
“Set a date. An actual date. Not a concept — a day.”
My phone rings.
A call. Sloane.
The timing is so exact I stare at the screen for a full second.
“Answer it,” Marcel says.
I pick up. “Sloane?”
“Kane.” Her voice is wrong. Tight and fractured at the edges. “Thank god.”
“What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, just—“ A shaky breath. “That client I told you about? The rebrand? They fired me today. Said my work wasn’t aligned with their vision.” A pause. I can hear her trying to hold it together. “Three months, Kane. Three months I gave that account.”
“Sloane—”
“And I know it’s stupid to be this upset over one client, but—“ She’s crying now. “I needed my best friend tonight and Vera’s not answering her phone.”
I’m the reason my sister is crying alone tonight.
“She’s probably busy,” I hear myself say. The lie is automatic.
“She’s always busy lately.” Sloane’s voice cracks. “I’ve been trying to reach her all evening. And I know she’s seeing Gerald, and I’m happy for her, I am, but I feel like I’m losing her. Like she’s somewhere I can’t follow and she doesn’t even notice I’m being left behind.”
She doesn’t know she’s describing me. She has no idea she’s telling me exactly what I’m doing to her.
“I’m sure she’s not doing it on purpose.”
“I know she’s not. That’s what makes it worse.” She takes a shaky breath. “She’s in that honeymoon phase where nothing else matters. And I get it. I do. But I miss her. I miss my best friend.”
Marcel is watching me. Reading every expression. He doesn’t look away, which is the most Marcel thing he could do.
“Do you want me to come over?” I offer.
“No, it’s okay. I don’t want to ruin your night.” A pause. “Where are you?”
“Just having drinks with Marcel.”
“Tell him I say hi.” Another shaky breath. “I’m sorry for dumping this on you. I needed to hear a friendly voice.”
“Sloane, you’re my sister. You can always call me.”
“I know. I love you. Thanks for picking up.”
“Love you too.”
I set the phone face-down on the table. A few seconds pass before Marcel speaks.
“She called her brother because her best friend is too busy with her brother to answer the phone. Do you understand what you’re doing to her?”
“Yes.”
“Then fix it. This week.”
My phone buzzes on the table. I flip it over.
Lisa.
Marcel reads my expression. “What?”
I show him the screen.
Lisa: Hello Kane. Can I call you for a minute? Want to ask you something about the whole Sloane situation.
He reads it. Sets the phone back down. “That’s not good.”
“No.”
Me: Sure. Now okay?
Lisa: Calling now.
I step outside, and the cold hits me the same moment my phone does.
“Lisa.”
“Kane. Thanks for taking this.” Professional. Careful. “I’ll be quick. But I’ve been meaning to reach out since the gala.”
“About what?”
“About coffee. About Sloane.” A pause. “She’s been texting me constantly about setting up dinner.
The three of us. And I wanted to know if you were actually interested or if I should tell her to stop.
I don’t want to waste your time or mine, and I definitely don’t want to make things weird with Sloane if you’re not interested. ”
The directness catches me off guard. Something in my chest eases — because she named the thing, asked the question, and waited for an honest answer. The opposite of everything Vera and I have been doing.
“I appreciate that,” I say. “And I need to be equally direct: I’m seeing someone.”
Silence.
Then: “Oh.”
“I should have said something at the gala. I apologize for that.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “I won’t say anything to Sloane.” A pause. “Whoever she is, I hope it works out.”
We say goodbye. I stand in the cold a moment, breath fogging, and think about how many people are telling me the same thing without knowing they’re telling me the same thing.
I go back inside.
Marcel settles the tab not long after. We step outside into the November cold together.
“Calling an Uber,” he says. “Had one too many.”
His ride arrives within minutes. He pauses at the car door.
“I’m not judging you for being with Vera,” he says. “If she makes you happy, that’s good.” He meets my eyes. “But the longer you wait, the more Sloane’s going to count. Every week is another week she’ll remember when she’s deciding whether to forgive you. Both of you.”
He gets in. The car pulls away.
The moment I enter my penthouse, I pour a scotch and take it to the window where I think about my sister crying alone tonight because I have been, every single day for six weeks, choosing this secret over her. Not dramatically. Not consciously.
So this: the hiding, the lying, the small daily betrayals compounding into something that might not survive. This needs to end. This weekend.
I sit with that for a moment. The way the best structural solutions arrive — not constructed but recognized. Already true before I named it. I’ve decided before the elevator doors open and Vera walks in.
She’s in jeans and an oversized sweater, overnight bag over one shoulder, hair in a messy bun. She looks like home and a problem I don’t know how to solve, both at once. Then she reads my face.
Her smile dies.
She drops her bag. Crosses to me.
“Kane. What’s wrong?”
“Sloane called me upset.”
The color leaves her face so completely I watch it go.
“She lost a client today. A big one. She’s devastated.” I meet her eyes. “She tried to reach you. All evening. You didn’t answer.”
Her brow furrows. “I was working late on the Whitfield proposal. My phone was—”
She stops. Goes completely still. Then, all at once, without any single visible movement, her face settles into understanding.
“I turned my phone off.” Barely a whisper. “I turned it off because I was trying to focus and because I knew Sloane would probably call and want to talk about you and Lisa and I just — I couldn’t.”
Her hands shake as she pulls her phone from her bag. Turns it on.
We both watch the screen light up. Notification after notification.
Sloane: Can you talk?
Sloane: I need you right now
Sloane: Vera please
Sloane: I had the worst day and I just need my person, where are you?
Sloane: Where are you?
Sloane: Never mind, I’ll call Kane instead.
Two missed calls. Six unanswered texts.
The timestamps tell the whole story. Starting at six-thirty. Escalating. The gap between messages getting shorter. And then the resignation — the pivot to the second option because the first had gone silent.
Never mind, I’ll call Kane instead.
“Oh god.” Her voice breaks. Hand pressed over her mouth. “Oh god, she needed me.”
“Yeah.”
“I told myself it was about work.” A tear rolls down her cheek as she’s staring at the messages. “But that’s a lie. I turned it off because I knew she’d call and I couldn’t listen to her plan your future with someone else and act like that was fine. I was protecting myself.”
She looks up at me. She doesn’t look away from what she’s saying. That’s the part that gets me. “I chose an uncomfortable conversation over being there for my best friend when she actually needed me. What kind of person does that?”
I pull her up onto the couch, into my arms. She comes without resistance, curling against me, and I hold her while she cries.
“This is the cost,” she whispers. “This is what we’re doing to her.”
“I know.”
We sit in silence.
“Lisa called me at the bar,” I say after a while.
She goes still. “And?”
“She asked if I was actually interested or if she should tell Sloane to stop. I told her the truth — that I’m seeing someone. That I should have said something sooner.”
Vera pulls back to look at me. “How did she take it?”
“Graciously.”
She wipes her eyes and looks back at the screen. At Sloane’s texts sitting there, the timestamps a quiet record of what tonight cost.
“So when?” Her voice is small. “When are we going to tell her?”
“This weekend.”
Her eyes widen slightly.
“This weekend,” she repeats.
“Yes.” I hold her gaze. “You go to Sunday brunch with her like any other week. I show up an hour in.”
She goes still. I watch her take the weight of it — the real day, the real table, the real face across it. Then she nods.
“Okay. This weekend.”
The silence that follows settles between us.
“We both know how badly this is going to hurt her,” she whispers.
“Yes.”
My hands tighten on hers.
“Yes.”
She closes her eyes. Leans into me. I press my lips to her hair and hold her, and we sit together in the dark with the weight of what we’ve done and the knowledge that it ends this weekend.