SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER

Chapter 10

Jade Calloway had two modes when she suspected something.

The first was direct — she asked the question plainly, looked you in the eye, and waited with the particular patience of someone who had decided they were going to get an answer and the only variable was how long it took. This mode was efficient and slightly terrifying and most people capitulated within thirty seconds.

The second was oblique — she circled the thing, approached it from angles, asked questions that were technically about something else but were actually about the thing, until the person she was talking to either confessed voluntarily or found themselves so thoroughly cornered that confession felt like their own idea.

I had known Jade for eleven years. I knew both modes intimately. I could see them coming from a distance the way you could see weather moving in over the water — the particular quality of light before it changed.

She was in mode two on Sunday.

We were at brunch — just the two of us, our regular place in Park Slope, the corner table we had claimed as ours so long ago that the staff seated us there automatically. Jade was having eggs and I was having the French toast and we were doing what we did on Sunday mornings, which was debrief the week with the thoroughness of two people who had been doing it since college and had made it a kind of art form.

She had been talking about her work — a project she was managing, a colleague who was difficult, the particular exhaustion of being competent in a room full of people who were trying to prove they were more competent — and I had been listening and responding and everything was normal, and then she refilled her coffee and said, without looking up:

"So you and Marcus have been spending a lot of time together."

I cut a piece of French toast.

"We've run into each other a couple of times," I said. "He came into the bakery."

"A couple of times?"

"A few times. He likes the tarts." I kept my voice easy. "You know how your mother is — every family dinner, every event. We're in the same orbit."

"Mmhm." She looked up. Her eyes were dark and bright and entirely focused. "How was the bookstore?"

I set my fork down.

"He mentioned it," she said, before I could speak. Not defensively — just factually, supplying the information so I didn't have to wonder how she knew. "In passing, yesterday. He said he'd run into you in Cobble Hill and you'd had coffee after. He was — " she paused, choosing the word carefully, "— easy about it. Like it was nothing. Which is almost exactly how he sounds when something is something."

This was the thing about Jade. She knew Marcus the way only a sibling could know a person — not from the outside, not from the careful presentation he showed the world, but from years of accumulated proximity, from the specific knowledge of how he sounded when he was managing something versus when he wasn't.

"It was coffee, Jade," I said.

"I know." She held my gaze. "Ava. I'm not — I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm asking because you're my best friend and he's my brother and I have two people I love very much and I want to understand what's happening between them."

The brunch crowd moved around us, cheerful and oblivious. Someone nearby was laughing at something on their phone. The city went on being the city.

I looked at Jade.

Eleven years. The first week of college, the two of us in the same dormitory hallway, both looking at a campus map with the identical expression of people who had decided to appear more confident than they were. She had made a joke about the map being deliberately misleading as a hazing tactic, I had laughed, and that had been the beginning of something that had held through every complicated thing since.

I loved her. I loved her in the specific way you loved someone who had been present for every version of yourself — the uncertain versions, the wrong versions, the versions you weren't proud of — and had stayed anyway.

Which was exactly why this was the conversation I had been dreading since the Sunday morning in the storage room when I'd made my decision.

"There's nothing happening," I said carefully. "There hasn't been anything to tell you."

Jade was quiet for a moment. "That's different from saying there's nothing there."

I looked at the table.

"Ava." Her voice was quieter now, the directness softened. "I have watched you at every family dinner for the past month. I have watched you at the brunch when Isabelle was there. I know your face." She paused. "I've always known your face."

The French toast had gone cold. Outside the window, a couple walked past with a stroller, leaning into each other, unhurried.

"I have feelings for him," I said. Each word measured. "I have had feelings for him for a long time. I have never acted on them. I have never told him." I looked up. "That's the truth, Jade. All of it."

She held my gaze for a long moment. I watched her process it — the pieces she'd been holding separately clicking into arrangement, years of small observations suddenly legible.

"How long?" she asked.

"Four years."

Something moved across her face. Not anger — something more complicated. Recognition, maybe. The slight wince of someone understanding a thing they wished they'd understood sooner.

"Four years," she repeated.

"Give or take."

"And you never —"

"No. Never." I kept my voice steady. "He doesn't know. He's never known."

She was quiet for a long moment, turning her coffee cup on its saucer. "He's engaged, Ava."

"I know."

"Isabelle is —"

"I know who Isabelle is. I like Isabelle." The sentence cost something. "I know exactly who she is and what she has and why this is — I know, Jade."

Jade looked at me for a long moment with the expression she had when she was holding more thoughts than she was releasing. Then she looked at the window.

"Are you going to do anything about it?" she asked, carefully.

The question landed in the space between us and sat there.

I thought about Sunday in the storage room. I thought about what I had told Renee. I thought about the green dress and the hallway at the dinner party and everything is intentional and the bookstore and two hours over coffee in the rain.

I thought about what I owed Jade, which was the truth.

"I'm not going to do anything reckless," I said. "I'm not going to say something to him. I'm not going to try to come between them." A pause. "But I have stopped pretending the feeling doesn't exist. Around him." Another pause. "Around myself."

Jade absorbed this. She was a long time absorbing it.

"Okay," she said finally.

I stared at her. "Okay?"

"I said okay." She looked back at me, her expression complicated and clear at the same time. "I'm not going to tell you how to feel, Ava. I'm not going to tell you the feeling is wrong. Feelings aren't wrong." She paused. "What you do with them is a different conversation."

"I know."

"And Isabelle —"

"I know."

"And Marcus is my brother and if anyone gets hurt in this —"

"Jade." I reached across the table and put my hand over hers. "I know. I know all of it. I have been knowing all of it for four years." My voice stayed even. "I'm not asking for your permission. I'm not asking for anything. I'm telling you because you asked and because you deserved a straight answer and because you are the most important person in my life and I am not willing to lie to you."

She looked at my hand over hers.

Then she turned her hand over and squeezed mine, hard, for a moment.

"Don't hurt him," she said quietly. "And don't let him hurt you." She paused. "And for the love of God, Ava — don't blow up my family."

"I'm not going to blow up your family."

"You'd better not." She picked up her fork. "Because I will be absolutely furious and you know what I'm like when I'm furious."

"Catastrophic," I confirmed.

"Catastrophic," she agreed. And then, because she was Jade and she had always been able to do this — move between serious and light with the ease of someone who understood that life required both — she pointed her fork at my French toast and said, "Are you going to eat that or should I?"

I pulled my plate back. "Get your own."

She laughed.

I laughed too, a beat after, and the tension at the table dissolved into the ordinary warm noise of two women at Sunday brunch, and underneath it the conversation sat like something newly spoken aloud — complicated and real and, now that it was out in the open, slightly less impossible to carry.

I ate my French toast. Jade stole a piece anyway.

Some things, at least, were completely predictable.