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Georgie brings the porters unasked and calls Wes "trouble" and me "the other one," and the corner booth does what corner booths do — it shrinks. Wes wants everything: the case, which I can't discuss; the launch security, which I mostly can; the story of the fire tables, which Sloane tells with her hands while her knee burns a hole in the air three inches from mine.

"Okay, but the REAL question." Wes levels a fry at his sister. "Mom's calling me twice a week for launch intel. She and Dad are coming up Saturday morning — that's confirmed, she made a spreadsheet — and she wants to know," the fry swings to me, "why the safety man Sloane 'won't stop mentioning' hasn't been to a family dinner in four years."

"Wow," Sloane says, into her drink. "The bread here. Incredible. Is this new bread, Georgie?"

"'Won't stop mentioning,'" Wes repeats, delighted, oblivious, twisting the knife he doesn't know he's holding. "Her words. What'd you DO, man, cite her cat? He cited her cat. That's in the family newsletter now, you're famous⁠—"

"You okay?" Wes asks me, a story later. "You keep checking the door."

"Habit." It is. Sight lines to exits, faces at the bar, a reflective-vest-shaped absence I keep scanning for. Half professional. Half something that needs a different word — because Prewitt is out there being watched by Ferro's people, and my gate list is a wall between him and this family, and I'm at this table lying to its foundation.

"He's been like this all month," Sloane says. "Alert. Like a large weird owl."

"He's protecting your barn, show respect. To BRADY," Wes announces, hoisting his porter, "who passed my sister's death trap FAIRLY, which I know because she'd have appealed anything less, and who I am buying dinner for until the end of time. I told you he was the best one, Sloanie."

"You did," she says, and she looks at me for one second too long, soft and reckless, before she catches herself. "You told me."

I feel it happen. The look. The last look, the one every hiding couple in history got caught on, because you can armor the words and schedule the truth and structure the nights, but the eyes are a live channel and mine have been transmitting since the Fourth of July a decade ago.

Sloane slides out — "restroom, guard my fries, both of you" — and squeezes past, her hand landing on my shoulder for balance. Half a second. Nothing. Everything. I watch her go the way I have never once in ten years allowed myself to watch her go: openly, like a man at his own table, following the piano all the way across the room.

The booth is quiet.

I turn back, and Wes is watching me.

Not confused. Not yet angry. Just — arriving. I've seen the face at a hundred scene walkthroughs: the moment the evidence stops being separate facts and becomes one story. The coffee I fixed her without asking, forty minutes ago. The group chat gone quiet the same month his sister learned my actual job. Two extensions to a five-day assessment. A spare flannel he ribbed me about in her mudroom — wrong size for Wes, right size for me. His best friend, who never looks at anyone, tracking his little sister across a bar like true north.

The jukebox changes songs. Somewhere behind me Georgie laughs at something. Wes sets his porter down on the exact center of the coaster, aligning it carefully, the way careful men do when everything else just moved.

"How long?" he says.

There are a hundred exits. Ten years of tent-pole engineering left me fluent in every one of them — the deflection, the joke, the it's-not-what-you-think, the clarifying question to buy ten seconds.

I don't take any of them. He's my best friend, and his sister asked me to stop assessing and I did, and the report's been true since a workbench three weeks ago even if the filing was scheduled for Sunday.

"Ten years," I say. "Three weeks."

He doesn't ask which question I'm answering. He knows. He's known me twenty years — knows I answer the whole question or none of it, knows ten and three aren't a contradiction, they're a confession with the boring parts removed.

And I watch both numbers hit him.

Chapter 14

Sloane

Iknow both numbers hit him, because I come back from the restroom into a booth with all the oxygen gone.

Wes is looking at the table. Brady is looking at Wes, sitting the way you'd sit next to something you're not sure is finished falling. My fries are unguarded. Nobody has to tell me — the knowledge just lands, cold, in the exact spot I've been carrying it for three weeks.

"Wes—"

"I'll take you home," my brother says, to his coaster. "Long day tomorrow. Boxes."

"Wes."

"Don't." He stands, drops bills on the table without counting them, which Wes never does, and looks at Brady for one second — one flat, unreadable second, from a face built for open weather — and says, "Not here," and walks out of the Tap & Barrel with his shoulders wrong.

Brady moves to follow and I put my hand on his chest. Through his shirt, his heart is going like a hose under pressure. "Let me," I say. "Ten years was yours. The next hour's mine. He's my brother."