Dating My Brother's Best Friend .

Chapter 4 :What Kai Knows.

My brother has always been able to tell when I am lying.

Not in the dramatic way, not like some kind of human lie detector who catches every twitch and micro-expression. It is quieter than that. It is the way he goes still when something does not add up. The way his eyes do a small thing — not narrowing, just settling, like they are taking a photograph of the moment for later review. He has done it since we were children and I have never once successfully hidden anything from him for longer than forty-eight hours.

I was now twenty hours into hiding something from him and I could already feel the clock.

He texted me at 7am.

Breakfast before work? The place on Meridian.

I stared at the message for a long time.

Kai suggesting breakfast on a Wednesday was not unusual. Kai suggesting breakfast on the third day of my internship at his company, one day after he had sat across from me and Roman at lunch and gone very quiet, was a different kind of suggestion entirely.

I typed back: Sure. 8?

He sent a thumbs up.

I put my phone down and looked at the ceiling of my bedroom and thought about my list. Item three specifically. No lying to Kai. Omitting details is different from lying.

I was about to test that theory quite seriously.

The place on Meridian was the kind of small neighbourhood café that had been there for fifteen years and would hopefully be there for fifteen more. Dark wood, mismatched chairs, the smell of proper coffee and something baking that you could never quite identify but always wanted. We had been coming here since Kai moved to this part of the city three years ago. It was our place in the specific way that some places become yours without you deciding it.

He was already there when I arrived. Two coffees on the table, his jacket on the back of his chair, reading something on his phone that he put away when he saw me come in.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," I said.

I sat down. I wrapped my hands around the coffee cup. I looked at my brother across the small table and thought about how well I knew his face — the easy way he carried himself, the laugh lines already starting at the corners of his eyes at twenty-three, the particular quality of his attention when it was fully on you.

It was fully on me.

"So," he said.

"So," I said.

He picked up his coffee. He took a sip. He put it down. He was going to make me wait and we both knew it and that was just how Kai operated — he never rushed towards a thing, he let the silence do the work first.

"How's the internship going?" he said.

"Good," I said. "Really good actually. The Harmon account is interesting and the brand strategy team is solid and I think I have an idea about their visual identity that nobody has—"

"Lina."

I stopped.

He was looking at me with that settled, careful expression.

"You and Roman," he said.

Not a question. He never made it a question when he already knew the direction of something.

"What about us," I said. Carefully. Technically not a lie.

"That's what I'm asking," he said. "What about you."

I looked at my coffee cup. "We're — it's new. It is a new thing. There is not much to say about it yet."

"A new thing," Kai repeated.

"Yes."

"You and Roman Vale."

"That is what I said."

He was quiet for a moment. Outside the window the street was doing its morning thing — people with bags, a woman walking a very small dog, a bus going past that shook the window slightly.

"Does he make you happy?" Kai said.

The question was so simple and so direct that it caught me completely off guard. I had prepared for suspicion. I had prepared for the older brother speech, the protective questions, the careful interrogation dressed up as conversation. I had not prepared for that.

"It's new," I said again. Softer this time.

Kai nodded slowly. He looked out the window for a moment and then back at me. "He's my best friend," he said. "You're my sister. Those are the two most important people in my life and whatever is happening between you is — it's a lot to hold."

"Kai—"

"I'm not saying stop," he said quickly. "I'm not saying that. I'm just saying—" he paused, choosing his words with the same care he always used when something mattered — "I need to know that you're both being honest with each other. That's all. Whatever it is, however new it is, I need it to be real."

I need it to be real.

I looked at my brother and felt the weight of item three on my list pressing against my chest like something physical.

"I hear you," I said.

Which was true. I heard every word of it.

Kai looked at me for a long moment. Then something in his expression shifted — not relief exactly, more like a decision to trust something he was not entirely sure about yet.

"Okay," he said. He picked up his coffee. "Good. Now tell me about this visual identity idea because if you've found something on the Harmon account that the rest of the team missed I need to hear it before Roman does."

I laughed before I could stop myself. It came out genuine and slightly too loud for a Wednesday morning café and Kai grinned across the table and for one moment everything felt completely normal.

Then I remembered that I had just looked my brother in the eye and omitted details at him for four straight minutes and normal was not exactly the right word for any of this.

I got to the building at 8:51.

Roman was in the lobby.

This was becoming a pattern I had not agreed to and was finding increasingly difficult to be neutral about. He was talking to someone from the client services team, something low and focused that ended when he looked up and saw me coming through the revolving door.

He said something brief to the client services person, who nodded and walked away, and then Roman walked across the lobby towards me with his hands in his pockets and that particular unhurried quality he had, like he had decided before he stood up that he was going to arrive at exactly the right moment and was simply fulfilling that decision.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning," I said.

He fell into step beside me towards the lifts. This was also becoming a pattern. I was trying to decide how I felt about patterns.

"Kai texted me last night," he said.

I looked at him. "What did he say?"

"He asked me to get breakfast with him this morning."

"He asked me the same thing."

"I know," Roman said. "He told me you'd said yes and then suggested we all go together and then said never mind, he would see us separately."

I thought about that. "He was testing something."

"Yes," Roman said.

"How did your conversation go?"

Roman pressed the lift button. The doors opened immediately, which felt slightly too convenient. We stepped in. The familiar forty seconds began their count.

"He asked me directly," Roman said.

"What did you say?"

"I told him it was new and that I was handling it carefully and that he did not need to worry about you."

I turned to look at him. "You told him not to worry about me?"

"Yes."

"Roman, I am a twenty year old woman. I do not need my brother told not to worry about me like I am—"

"I told him," Roman said, with the patient precision of someone who had already thought about this, "that you were not going to get hurt. Those were the words I used. I thought they were relevant."

The lift was at nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.

I looked at the doors in front of me.

"And are they?" I said. "Relevant?"

Silence.

Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.

"That depends on both of us," Roman said quietly.

The doors opened on thirty-eight.

He stepped out first. I followed. We walked down the corridor towards the brand strategy floor in the particular silence of two people who have just said something without saying it.

At the entrance to the floor he stopped and turned slightly.

"Kai is going to watch," he said. "He is going to watch both of us very carefully for the next few weeks. He is going to notice every inconsistency and file it away and eventually he is going to ask a question that requires a real answer."

"I know," I said. "He already almost did this morning."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him it was new." I paused. "And that there was not much to say about it yet."

Roman considered that. "That was good."

"I know it was good," I said. "I am not completely without resources, Roman."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. That almost-smile that I was starting to catalogue without meaning to.

"No," he said. "You are not."

He went into his office.

I went to my desk.

Claire looked up from her computer and then looked pointedly at Roman's office door and then back at her screen with an expression of heroic professionalism.

I opened my sketchbook.

I did not draw Roman's office door.

I drew Kai's face instead — that morning at the café, the exact quality of his expression when he said I need it to be real. The way he looked when he was trusting something that he was not sure deserved it yet.

I stared at the drawing for a long time.

Then I wrote one word underneath it, small and honest in the bottom corner of the page, because my sketchbook was the only place I allowed myself to be fully truthful.

Sorry.

At lunch I sat with Zara on the sixth floor at a table near the back where it was quieter.

She had been waiting patiently for two days. I could see it in the way she sat down across from me with her food and said nothing for exactly thirty seconds, which was the longest Zara had been silent in the four years I had known her.

Then she said: "Tell me everything."

So I told her. Not everything everything — not the board of directors, not the professional arrangement, not the list with its seven items. I told her the version that was closest to true without being the whole truth. That something had shifted. That Roman was — complicated. That Kai knew something was different and was being careful about it in the way Kai was always careful about things that mattered.

Zara listened with her chin in her hand and her food going cold in front of her.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

"Lina," she said.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm just going to say one thing."

"Zara."

"One thing and then I'll be quiet."

I looked at her.

"The way you talk about him," she said, "is not the way someone talks about something that is new and uncomplicated."

I opened my mouth.

"That was the thing," she said. "I said one thing. I'm done."

She picked up her fork and started eating with the satisfied expression of someone who has delivered the correct information and is now allowing it to do its own work.

I looked at my food.

I thought about the lift. About forty seconds and the particular quality of Roman's voice saying that depends on both of us. About my brother's face at breakfast and the word I had written in the bottom corner of my sketchbook.

I picked up my fork.

"It is new," I said. "And uncomplicated."

"Absolutely," Zara said pleasantly.

"It is."

"Of course."

"Zara."

"I'm eating," she said. "I'm not saying anything. I'm just eating my lunch."

I looked at her.

She looked at her food with the expression of someone who was extremely not saying anything.

I ate my lunch.

I did not think about the lift.

I thought about the lift the entire time.