POV: Liam
Jasmine took the phone from my hand without asking and read the message herself.
I watched her face go careful — the particular flatness she wore when she was deciding how much weight to give something before she spoke. She slid off the counter and straightened her skirt and read it again.
I zipped my pants.
"Did you know he was coming back this week?" she asked, and her voice was not sharp, just plain, the way she got when she was asking a question she already suspected the answer to.
"I had no idea."
She set the phone face-down on the counter. "He had three deals moving in London. The Whitmore acquisition, the streaming partnership, and the Calloway refinancing. That's his busiest window of the quarter. He would not pull out of the middle of all three without telling one of us first."
She was not wrong, and we both knew it. I thought about the text — three sentences, Asher's name, the specific absence of any explanation — and the suspicion I had been keeping at a distance hardened into a decision.
"I'll go in early," I said. "Before he has time to prepare his face."
"Good." She reached past me for the wine and poured herself a glass with the unhurried ease of a woman who had just been interrupted on a kitchen counter and was choosing not to make it anyone's problem. "I'll keep the island warm."
"That is a genuinely cruel thing to say to a man who has to be up before dawn."
"Consider it motivation."
Jasmine nodded. She picked up the phone and turned the stove back on, the movement direct and unhesitating — the way she moved when a problem had been identified and assigned and she trusted the person she had assigned it to.
She crossed to me and kissed me once, hard, both hands flat on my chest. Then she turned back to the cutting board and picked up the knife, and we finished dinner in near silence, moving around each other in the kitchen the way two people moved when they had been sharing the same space long enough that the geography had become automatic.
I set my alarm an hour earlier than usual and lay in the dark for a while after Jasmine fell asleep, thinking about my brother’s return.
Asher's light was already on when I came through the lobby. The elevator ride up felt longer than it was.
He was at the window when I pushed the door open, hands in his pockets, back to me, looking out over the city with the particular quality of stillness that meant he had been standing there long enough that it was no longer about the view.
When he turned, I clocked the details the way I always did about Asher — before I understood them, before I had decided what they meant.
The pallor was consistent with a long overnight flight followed by no sleep and a straight line to the office. The shadow under his eyes read the same way. He looked like a man who had covered too many time zones too fast and had not yet caught up with his own body.
"You're in early," he said. His voice was even, the register he used when he was giving nothing away on purpose.
"So are you." I crossed to the coffee setup, poured two cups, and set one on the edge of his desk. "How was London?"
Asher sat down with the deliberateness of someone whose body was asking for more rest than the day was going to allow. "Productive," he said. "Cold. The usual."
"Deals close the way you needed them to?"
"Moving. The Calloway refinancing takes another week. Whitmore is nearly there."
"Good." I sat down across from him, held my cup, and let a beat of silence sit between us — the kind that had always been comfortable, two people who had spent enough years in the same rooms that quiet did not need to be filled. Then: "Why did you come back early?"
The pause that followed was not long. It was precisely as long as it needed to be to confirm that he had expected the question and had prepared for it.
"The British have a genuinely hostile relationship with food. Every meal is a beige protein on white bread, presented without apology. I reached my limit and decided the Calloway timeline could survive without me for a week."
I let the deflection land. Pushed it nowhere. "Come to dinner tomorrow night. Jasmine's cooking, and Aurora has been asking about you since before you left."
The guard behind his eyes shifted — not dropped, but loosened at the edges. Aurora did that to him. She had inherited Jasmine's complete indifference to his composure, and he had not worked out a defense against it yet, which made him more honest around her than he was around most people.
"What time?" he asked.
"Whenever you're done here. She eats early, but she'll stay up for you."
He nodded and wrote something on the pad beside his laptop — not a note, just an action to occupy his hands while he put whatever he was actually thinking somewhere out of sight.
I stood and crossed the room. At the door I stopped, turned back, and gripped his shoulder the way I had been doing since we were in our twenties and neither of us had the language for most of what we needed to say. His hand came up and covered mine briefly, and then I was in the hallway.
I had taken four steps when I looked back through the glass.
Asher had not opened his laptop. He was sitting at the desk with one hand laid flat on the blotter, very still, looking at a point in the middle distance that had nothing in it.
Not thinking through a problem, not running numbers. Just sitting with the specific weight of a man carrying a grief he had not yet named.
I watched for two seconds.
Then he reached for his phone, opened it, and the composure came back — settled over him like a coat he had simply picked up off the floor and put back on.