CHAPTER 9

The bistro was the kind of place Elena and Leo had been going to since he was in college — dim lighting, cheap house wine, a menu that hadn't changed in a decade. Tonight it felt like the wrong setting for the tension sitting at their table.

"You look tired, El," Leo said, though he was the one who looked it — a faint shadow under his eyes, a restlessness in the way he kept turning his water glass in slow circles.

"It's been a lot," Elena admitted. "New role. New problems." She studied him for a beat. "You look tired too."

Leo shrugged, too quickly. "Freelance life. Feast or famine."

"Which is it right now?"

"Feast," he said, and something about the way he said it — a half-second too fast, too bright — made her set her fork down.

"Leo."

"I'm fine, Elena. God, can we just have dinner without you interrogating me? You're not my mother."

The words landed sharper than he'd probably meant them to. Elena felt the old, familiar ache under her ribs — the one that had never fully healed from years of being the responsible one, the one who paid for things, the one who worried so their actual mother didn't have to.

"I'm not trying to interrogate you," she said quietly. "I'm trying to have dinner with my brother, who I haven't seen in six weeks, and who just told me things are great in a voice that says the opposite."

Leo's jaw tightened. For a moment she thought he might actually tell her something true. Instead he reached for his wine, drained half the glass, and changed the subject to a client project that sounded, the longer he talked about it, increasingly made-up.

Elena let it go. She'd learned, the hard way, that pushing Leo only ever made him dig in deeper. Better to leave the door open and hope he walked through it himself, someday, before whatever he was hiding got too heavy to carry alone.

---

They said goodbye on the sidewalk outside, an awkward, half-hearted hug that neither of them fully committed to.

"Call me," Elena said. "Actually call me. Not just when you need something."

"I don't need anything," Leo said, a little too firmly, before softening. "I'll call. I promise."

She watched him walk toward the subway, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature. Just before he turned the corner, his phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen, and even from a distance, Elena saw his whole body go rigid.

He didn't answer it. He shoved the phone back into his pocket and disappeared around the corner without looking back.

Elena stood on the sidewalk a moment longer, cold settling into her chest that had nothing to do with the weather either.

---

Back at her apartment, she poured herself a glass of wine she didn't really want and sat by the window, replaying the dinner in her head. The lie about the client project. The flinch at whatever notification had just come through. The designer watch on his wrist that she was almost certain hadn't been there at Christmas.

She thought about calling their mother, then decided against it — no reason to worry her with a hunch and no facts. She thought about calling Alexander, then decided against that too, for reasons she didn't examine too closely. This felt like something that belonged to her and Leo alone. At least for now.

Instead, she opened her laptop and typed Leo's name into a search bar, then stopped, her fingers hovering over the keys.

*If something's wrong, I'll find out. But not like this. Not behind his back.*

She closed the laptop and sat in the dark a while longer, the unease from her office that afternoon — the hang-up call, Serena's odd comment, the vendor contract with the wrong signature — settling in next to this new, quieter worry about her brother.

Two separate threads. Two things that felt, for reasons she couldn't yet name, like they might not stay separate for long.