I Should Never Have Slept With My Best Friend's Brother

Chapter Three: The Morning

I didn't sleep.

That wasn't new. Insomnia had been following me around since I was twenty-two, showing up reliably somewhere between late-night calls with lawyers and early-morning market reports. I'd stopped fighting it years ago and started using the hours instead.

By four in the morning I was dressed, coffee in hand, standing at the living room window.

Barcelona looked completely different at this hour. The performance of the city had been cleared away, leaving only the essential parts — amber streetlights, the occasional car moving through empty streets, the faint sound of the ocean if you stayed still long enough to hear it.

I heard her before I saw her.

Not footsteps exactly. More like a change in the quality of the silence. The specific shift that happened when she entered a room, like the air itself rearranged slightly to accommodate her.

Nadia walked in from the hallway barefoot. Hair piled on top of her head, loose strands falling around her face. An oversized sleep shirt that stopped mid-thigh. She moved without hurry, without any apparent awareness of the time or of me standing ten feet away.

She walked straight to the fireplace.

She stood in front of it and closed her eyes.

Just stood there, completely still, letting the warmth reach her face. Her lashes were dark against her pale skin. The firelight caught the red in her hair and made it look like something burning.

I turned deliberately back to the window.

I moved to the kitchen island and refilled my coffee. After a few minutes she moved too, padding into the kitchen, reaching past me for the cabinet where the mugs were stored. Her arm came within two inches of my shoulder.

Neither of us moved to make space.

"You're in my way," she said. Her voice was rough with sleep but still carried that particular edge she never seemed to misplace.

"This is my kitchen," I said.

"Congratulations." She reached past me, took a mug, and moved to the coffee machine without another word.

The silence between us had texture. It always had. With most people silence was just an absence of noise. With Nadia it was something you could feel pressing against your skin.

I watched her from the corner of my eye — the easy, unhurried way she moved through the space, like she had quietly decided the house was a temporary extension of herself and adjusted accordingly. No performance. No discomfort.

Most people around me performed. Adjusted their posture. Laughed a little too quickly. Chose their words with visible care.

Nadia never had. Not once in three years.

It was, I had told myself repeatedly, one of the most irritating things about her.

Sienna appeared twenty minutes later looking like she had argued with sleep and lost. Hair everywhere. Eyes barely open. She made a sound that might have been a greeting as she shuffled past me.

Nadia handed her a mug without being asked.

Sienna leaned her head against Nadia's shoulder and sipped it slowly. Neither of them spoke. They didn't seem to need to.

I watched them — my sister and this woman who had somehow become the most constant presence in her life — and felt something complicated move through my chest that I immediately chose not to look at directly.

"We're leaving today," Sienna said quietly, not meeting my eyes. Her voice carried a practiced kind of firmness, like she'd rehearsed it.

"Stay," I said.

She looked up.

"I'll be done with my meetings by the weekend," I said, keeping my voice even. "The house is yours after that."

Neither of them responded immediately.

I picked up my briefcase, straightened my jacket, and walked to the door.

I did not look at Nadia on my way out.

Which was precisely why I caught it — the sound of her setting her mug down on the counter with more force than necessary the moment the door clicked shut behind me.

I stood on the other side of it for exactly one second.

Then I walked to my car.