81

Marianna.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

Neither of us smiled. But my whole body was smiling. I could feel it happening under my skin, this stupid full-length hum, because he was here, in my brother's kitchen doorway, holding takeout bags, wearing a white T-shirt I'd never seen and travel exhaustion I wanted to smooth away with my hands.

Nine days. He was finally in the same room as me, and I couldn't touch him, because the third person in that room was my brother.

"You're eating with us," Marco said, already unpacking the Thai containers. "That wasn't a question. Sit."

Duane sat.

I got the plates. This meant reaching past him at the counter—close enough to catch the smell of his jacket, cedar and airplane and nine days apart—and as I passed, his hand found my wrist below the counter's edge. Half a second. Warm. Gone.

My pulse didn't recover for three minutes. I counted.

We ate at the little table that fits two people comfortably and three people conspiratorially. Marco talked—a contract negotiation, a meeting that ran long, his eternal grief about the Marlins bullpen. Duane answered in his one-sentence way. I pushed pad thai around my plate and tried to act like a person who wasn't sitting eight inches from the man she'd been falling asleep on the phone with every night for a month.

The window unit rattled. The candle Marco lights when we have "company" flickered on the counter. Everything looked normal.

Then Duane looked across the table at me and said, "Work's been good?"

Such a small question. So safe.

Marco's fork paused. Just for half a second. Then kept going.

"Yeah," I said. "The tennis player hit full training load this week. First time since March."

"Good outcome."

"Really good outcome." And then—because I'm me, because my mouth outruns my judgment—I kept going. About Oliver's condition. About Duane's P4 at Zandvoort, about how he could've been more gracious about it.

"P4 is P4," he said.

"P4 with a compromised shoulder is—"

"Seventy-eight percent. I told you."

"You told me from an airplane. I hadn't assessed—"

"You're assessing now," he said.

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

Too late. The whole exchange had happened in our shorthand—percentages, telemetry, the easy back-and-forth of two people who talk every single day—and it had happened right in front of a sports agent who reads people for a living.

The kitchen went very quiet.

Marco set down his fork. Not dropped—set down, carefully, the way you put down something you might otherwise throw. He picked up his beer. He didn't drink it. He looked at the wall across from him, a plain cream wall with nothing on it, and studied it like it owed him money.

The window unit rattled. The candle flame bent and straightened.

"Right," Marco said, to the wall. "Right."

"Marco—" I started.

"I'm going to ask you something." His voice was quiet. That was the scary part. Marco is loud when he's fine. "I'm asking because I'm your brother and I'm his best friend, and those two things are pulling in opposite directions right now, and I'd rather ask than keep pretending I don't see it." He turned and looked at me. Our mother's eyes. "How long, Marianna?"

The room dropped two degrees.

"Marco," Duane said.

"Don't." Marco didn't raise his voice. "Don't say my name like that. You taught me that move. I know that move."

I put my fork down. My hands were cold. Under the table, Duane's knee pressed against mine—steady, just once—and I took a breath.

"Since before Silverstone," I said.

Marco closed his eyes. One second. Two.

"How long before Silverstone?"

"Montreal," Duane said.

"Montreal." Marco opened his eyes and ran a hand down his face. "That was three months ago. Three months, and neither of you—" He stopped himself. Breathed. His jaw worked. "Okay. Okay."

He picked the beer back up. Still didn't drink it. He was holding it the way you hold a railing.

"Is it—" He tried again. "Are you two—"

"I don't know what to call it," I said. Honestly. "We haven't put a name on it."

And then Marco did the thing I'll remember for the rest of my life.

He turned to Duane. Not to me—to Duane. And all the lawyer went out of his voice, and all the big brother went out of it too, and what was left was just a person asking the only question that mattered to him.

"Is she okay?"

The candle flickered. The bar two blocks east thumped faintly through the wall.

Duane held his gaze. Didn't blink. Didn't reach for a careful sentence.

"Yes," he said.

Ten seconds. Marco looked at his best friend for ten full seconds—I watched twenty years of friendship get weighed on a scale I couldn't see—and then something in his shoulders came down half an inch.

He nodded. Once.

Then he stood up and started collecting the empty containers, briskly, loudly, a man processing his feelings through recycling.

"This conversation is not over," he said, stacking boxes. "Especially the part where you two hid it for three months—" He shook his head, dumped the containers in the trash, and turned around. "But I've watched you look at each other since June and pretend you weren't, and I'm tired. So." He pointed at Duane. "Guest room is—"

"He's not staying," I said.

"I am staying," Duane said. To me. Not to Marco.

I looked at him across the table. The candle. The empty plates. My brother standing there with his arms crossed, watching whatever was passing between us with the expression of a man rapidly recalculating his entire year.

"We should talk," I said. Meaning: there are things I've been saving for when you were in the same room.

"Yes," Duane said. Meaning: I know. Me too.

"It's my apartment," Marco announced, to no one in particular. "I just want that on the record. Mine." He pointed at each of us in turn. "Real conversation tomorrow. With actual words." The finger landed on Duane. "And you're making breakfast."

His door closed.

And then it was just us.

The apartment settled around the silence—the window unit, the candle, the bar down the street sliding into its slow late-set. I looked at Duane across the wreckage of dinner, at his tired eyes and his travel-creased white shirt, and it hit me all over again, the enormous simple fact of it: he was here. No screen. No time zones. Here, at my brother's crooked little table, and my brother knew, and the ceiling had not fallen.

"Hi," I said again. Like we were starting over. Like the last hour had been the prologue and this was the actual hello.

"Hi," he said. Like he agreed.

He reached across the table and put his hand over mine. Warm. Certain. His thumb moved across my knuckles, and I watched him do it—watched his hand cover my hand on my brother's table, in the open, no counter-edge to hide below—and my chest did something so big I had to breathe around it.

"You reorganized the supply cabinet," he said.

I stared at him. "How do you—"

"Oliver texted me."

"Oliver—" I closed my eyes. "Oliver is a snitch, and he and Derek deserve each other."

"He said you alphabetized the client folders. He felt I needed to know."

"I was maintaining standards."

"Nine days," he said. "You were counting."

I looked at our hands. His thumb had found the inside of my wrist—the pulse point, the same spot as Silverstone—and settled there, and my pulse was thundering out the answer before my mouth could decide on one.

"Were you?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

No hesitation. No qualifier. Just yes, and his thumb on my hammering pulse, and the candle burning down between us.

"Tell me something," I said softly.

His thumb moved. Once.

"I'm glad I'm back," he said.

I turned my hand over under his and held on.

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

Down the hall, very faintly, through his closed door, my brother turned up his television just loud enough to make a point.

We laughed. Quietly. Together.