Chapter Forty-Eight—Riley
I've been smoothing my shirt for about ten minutes.
The table looks right. The food smells right. The house still has boxes in two corners and masking tape on the trim by the kitchen window that Ethan keeps saying he'll remove and then doesn't, because he's been putting up shelves instead.
None of that matters. What matters is that Connor is going to walk through that door any minute, and I have no idea which version of him is coming.
“I could answer shirtless,” Liam says, appearing behind me. “Strategic distraction. Very committed to the cause.”
“No.”
“It's a great opener. Sets a tone.”
“What tone?”
“Confidence. Availability. A little chaos.”
“That's three tones.”
“I contain multitudes.” He slides his arms around me from behind and rests his chin on my shoulder. “He's coming,” he says, quieter. “That's already the win.”
Ethan passes through the kitchen and straightens something on the counter that was already straight.
“Ethan,” Andrew says from the living room.
“What.”
“You've moved the salt twice.”
“I'm adjusting the—”
Liam leans over and moves it back. “It's salt.”
“The placement matters for—”
“Ethan.” I turn and look at him. He's in his good shirt. He's been in his good shirt since four-thirty. “Thank you for making dinner,” I say. “It looks excellent. Leave the salt.”
He eyes it. “It's in the wrong—”
“Leave it.”
He leaves it.
The doorbell rings at seven exactly. Connor is always on time.
Sarah smiles first. She's holding sparkling cider—not wine, a nice gesture—and she hands it over with warmth that makes me want to hug her immediately. I do.
“Your house is beautiful,” she says, stepping inside.
“It's got tape on the trim.”
“Character,” she says. “Very intentional.” Her eyes move around the living room and whatever she sees there softens her expression. She's already putting something together.
Connor is behind her. He looks like he stayed up too late preparing for something he's not sure how to do. He clears his throat. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say.
We hug. Brief. Slightly stiff. Completely us.
Liam materializes from the kitchen far too prepared for this moment. “Connor. Sarah. Come in—” He gestures at the living room. “This is the house. We live here now. Everything is fine and normal.”
Andrew appears behind him. “We're not saying normal.”
“I'm setting a tone.”
“You can't open with a tone.”
“That's literally what a tone is.”
Connor watches the exchange like a man recalibrating.
He's worked with Liam for three years. He knows exactly what Liam looks like leading with charm—he's watched him do it in boardrooms, at deal dinners, across the table from investors who needed warming up.
He's used it. This version of it is new to him.
I see Sarah glance at Connor. The small shift in her expression. She's already ahead of him.
“Come sit down,” I say. “Ethan made enough food to last us into spring.”
Ethan shakes Connor's hand at the kitchen doorway. “Connor. Good to see you.” He takes the cider. “I'll get these in the fridge.”
We sit. Liam opens wine. Andrew takes the seat directly across from Connor—no ambiguity. I sit beside Connor out of reflex. Old habit.
Small talk first. Connor asks about the neighborhood, the commute, how we found the house.
Practical questions, because practical questions don't require feelings.
Ethan answers most of them with clean, specific detail.
It's almost funny watching them fall into the same rhythm they have at the office—Connor asking, Ethan answering, neither of them wasting words.
Connor's shoulders drop about half an inch.
Sarah asks about the nursery.
“I'll show you after dinner,” I say. “You have to see the yellow.”
“What yellow?”
“Liam's yellow,” Andrew says.
Sarah looks at Liam.
“I made a bold choice,” Liam says, completely unrepentant. He reaches over and refills my water glass without looking at it, still watching Andrew. “The nursery needed energy.”
“You painted it the color of a yield sign,” Ethan says from the kitchen.
“Children respond well to high-contrast environments. It's developmental.”
“You read one article,” Andrew says.
“I read the headline of one article.” Liam sets the water down and presses a quick kiss to the side of my head on his way back to his seat. Not performed. Just reflex. “That's how science works.”
Sarah laughs. Connor is watching Liam the way he watches people he already knows do something he didn't expect.
Ethan serves dinner with the same focused precision he brings to everything else.
He tracks who has what. He notices Sarah's glass before she does.
He puts food on my plate without asking what I want, because at this point he knows my order of preference.
It's just what Ethan does when he cares about something—turns it into a system.
Andrew watches. He's watching Connor watch all of it, which I notice without drawing attention to.
About forty minutes in, I stand to grab more bread and my balance does the thing—nothing dramatic, just a half-step to recalibrate, one hand on the table edge. Andrew is already up. On his feet and beside me with a hand at my elbow before I've fully registered what happened.
“I've got it,” he says, taking the bread basket.
“I'm fine.”
“I know.”
He goes back to his seat. Ethan, from the other end of the table: “Sit down. I'll get whatever you need.” Liam is already up, refilling my glass—but he does it while making a joke to Sarah about something else entirely, and by the time he sits back down the table has moved on.
Connor hasn't moved on.
He's quiet for a beat. Long enough that Sarah notices.
“That wasn't planned?” he asks, low. Not quite to me. “They didn't—there wasn't a signal?”
“There never is,” I say.
He looks at his wine glass. “They just—”
“Yeah,” I say. “They do.”
Sarah puts her hand on his forearm briefly, and something in him releases.
The table talk moves on. Sarah asks Liam something about work and he answers in a lengthy embellished rant. His version of the story keeps getting bigger. By the third embellishment she's laughing so hard she has to put her fork down.
“None of that happened,” Andrew says.
“Most of it happened,” Liam says.
“The part with the helicopter didn't happen.”
“The helicopter was implied.”
“You cannot imply a helicopter.”
“Watch me.”
Connor makes a sound. Not quite a laugh. Close.
“The last Harrington dinner,” Connor says to Liam. “The closing one. How'd it go? I was already scoping my next deal in Cabo.”
Liam glances at him. “Fine. Gerald was happy. Numbers were clean.”
“Riley was there.” Connor picks up his glass. “Asset as usual.”
“Kept Trevor Harrington from complaining about the seating chart for forty-five minutes,” Liam says. “Honestly more useful than half the people we paid to be there.”
Connor almost smiles at that.
“So.” Liam leans back. “Are we doing another Cabo deal? Because we just bought a house and there's a baby coming, so if you're planning to send us all somewhere—”
“No,” Connor says.
“No Cabo?”
“No deals. Not with any of you. Not for a long time.”
“That seems personal,” Liam says.
“It is,” Connor says. “Very.”
Ethan, from across the table: “The Riverside portfolio would actually benefit from a similar structure to the Harrington model. Realistically you'd need—”
“Ethan,” Andrew says.
“I'm not saying now—”
“Not at dinner,” I say.
Ethan stops. Looks at the table. “Fine.”
Sarah laughs. She puts her hand on Connor's arm. “You do all make very good business partners.”
Connor looks at her. Then at Liam, who is grinning. At Ethan, who is studying the risotto. At Andrew, who gives nothing away.
“That's not what I'm worried about,” he says.
But something in his face shifts when he says it. Just slightly.
A few minutes later, Liam says something wrong about the house's square footage and Ethan corrects him without looking up.
“That's not what we were told at closing,” Liam says.
“The listing was off. I measured.”
“You measured the house.”
“The numbers were wrong by forty square feet.”
“Ethan.”
“It matters for the load-bearing assessment—”
“You had the walls assessed?”
“Obviously.”
“Why are you like this.”
Connor watches them. Not the argument, the way they move around each other.
Liam loud and exasperated, not actually angry.
Ethan unmoved, completely unbothered. As if they have already had this fight and will have it again next week.
Nobody performs anything. They're just two people who live together.
Connor picks up his wine.
After dinner, Sarah looks at me. “You promised us the nursery.”
We go upstairs.
The yellow is aggressive. Sarah stops in the doorway and takes it in.
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“It's cheerful,” Liam says from behind us.
“It's very committed to being cheerful,” she says.
Above the changing table, Ethan has pinned a printed chart. Three crib models. Safety ratings. Column comparisons in his handwriting. One option circled in red.
Connor walks over to it.
He reads it for a moment.
“You made a spreadsheet for the crib,” he says.
“It's a comparison chart,” Ethan says. “The safety rating differential between the top two models is not—”
“I can see the ratings.”
He stands there. Takes in the half-assembled glider in the corner, instructions still spread on the floor around it. The parenting book splayed open on the window seat, bookmarked two-thirds through. He doesn't say anything about any of it.
Then he crosses to the doorway. Up on top of the frame, mostly hidden, there's a strip of paint swatches. Yellows shading into greens shading into one neutral beige with a sticky note that just says better.
He looks at Andrew.
“Does he know you have those?” he asks.
Andrew doesn't look up from the corner where he's straightening a stack of storage boxes. “No.”
“Good plan,” Connor says.
He stands there another moment.
Then he looks at me.
“You really live here?” he says. Not quite a question.
“Yeah,” I say.
He nods once. Then turns and goes back downstairs.
Thirty minutes later, Connor and Sarah are at the front door ready to leave.
Sarah hugs me and says into my ear: “He's going to be okay. He just needs time to catch up to what he already knows.”
“I know,” I say.
She pulls back. “Your house is really great, Riley.”
Connor is shaking Liam's hand—actually shaking it, which I know was not easy for him, and Liam shakes back without making it weird, which is its own kind of gift. Connor nods at Andrew. Looks at Ethan.
“The risotto was good,” he says.
Ethan dips his head once. “I'll make the lamb next time.”
Connor looks at him. “There's a next time?”
“You said the risotto was good.”
“That's not what that means.”
“It is a little,” Ethan says.
Connor pulls me into a hug at the door and holds on a few seconds longer than he needs to. I feel the tension leave him.
“It’s a great house,” he says. Low, just for me.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He lets go. Clears his throat. “The yellow is still terrible.”
“We know,” Andrew says from behind me.
“Unanimously,” Ethan adds.
“I hate all of you,” Liam says.
Connor almost smiles. He follows Sarah down the front steps and I stand in the doorway and watch them go.
***
We don't go upstairs right away.
We stand in the kitchen instead, doing the messy part—dishes, leftovers, the entropy of a dinner that went long. Ethan starts on the pots. Andrew wipes down the table thoroughly.
“He shook your hand,” I say to Liam.
“He did.”
“I know.” He takes a sip of wine. “I'm choosing not to make it a thing by pointing out it's a thing.”
“That's very mature.”
“I'm very mature.”
I laugh. Ethan glances over from the sink. He doesn’t look away at first Andrew dries a pan and puts it away.
Later, upstairs, there's no performance about it. Liam pulls me in by the hand and kisses me slow and a little crooked, like he's been waiting all evening and now there's nowhere to be. He's grinning into it, which shouldn't work and does.
“Your brother shook my hand,” he says against my mouth.
“He did.”
“I'm extremely proud of everyone.”
“Go to sleep, Liam.”
“After,” he says.
Andrew puts his hand on the back of my neck and I let my head drop back against his shoulder.
Ethan sits on the edge of the bed. “You okay?” He means it the way he means it.
“Yeah.”
“Connor—”
“He came,” I say. “He shook Liam's hand. He told me the house was good.” I look at Ethan. “He said there's a next time.”
Ethan nods. Something settles in his face.
It’s progress.
Tonight, that's enough.