POV: Finn
I had not been alone in this apartment for two weeks.
That was the first thing I noticed when I came in tonight. The quiet. The way my own apartment sounded with no one in it. The dishwasher had finished. The lamp by the couch was on a timer. The plants were watered.
Nobody lived here anymore. I lived here, technically. The apartment had stopped being where I lived.
I poured myself a finger of something, and I sat on the couch in my coat, and I did not turn the television on.
I had been thinking, for two days now, about a flight to Tokyo.
Not seriously, the way I told myself it was not seriously. I had pulled the calendar up. I had sketched out the work I could do from the office there. I had, twice, opened the airline site and not closed the tab. The tab was still open on the laptop on the kitchen counter. Not seriously. Just looking. The lie had stopped working an hour ago.
The buzzer at the door went.
I had not asked anyone to come. I knew who it was anyway. I got up. I let him in.
Asher came through the door without taking his coat off. He had a bottle in his good hand. He set it on the table and looked at me.
"You have been thinking about leaving," he said, and it was not a question.
I leaned against the wall. "How do you know that."
He set the bottle down. "Because I know you. Sit down."
He took his coat off. He poured himself one. He sat on the chair across from the couch with his cast in his lap, the same way he had sat in the corridor in Italy.
We did not speak for a long beat. I drank.
"I am going to put it on the table," he said eventually, turning the glass in his good hand. "And once it is on the table you cannot pretend it is not on the table. Are you ready, or do you want another drink first."
I set my glass down. "Put it on the table."
He looked at me. "You love her."
I did not answer.
"You love her," he said again, "and I love her, and we have both been pretending we are doing this because she needs us here, and we both know that is partly true and partly not."
The room was quiet.
I had imagined this conversation a hundred times. None of the imagined versions had Asher saying it in this particular voice — flat, surgical, kind only in the specific way Asher was kind, which was by not making me carry the weight of the first sentence.
"Yes," I said.
He nodded once, absorbing it. "How long have you —"
"Years," I told him.
He held my gaze. "The same as me. Quieter about it. More carefully managed. Yes."
I closed my eyes for a second.
The shame was the first thing. The shame was always going to be the first thing. He has been dead three weeks. Less. Two and a half. He is in the ground. I sat in the row at the cathedral. I held his daughter on my chest in the corridor while his blood was still on Asher's shirt.
"I do not know," I said, "how to hold this thing without it being a betrayal of him."
Asher set his glass on the arm of the chair. "That is the question. The only question. Is it a betrayal, or is it a continuation."
I gripped my own knee. "Tell me what you think."
He took a slow drink. He looked at the rug.
"I have been thinking about Mum's letter," he said.
I started to speak. "Asher —"
"Listen," he said, and his voice had the quiet authority I had heard him use in boardrooms when he needed a room to stop moving. "Be a husband first. Be a father first. That is what she wrote. The thing she was telling Liam was: do not let the company eat the man. He listened. He spent the last years of his life choosing the woman and the child. He chose right."
I swallowed. "Yes."
He leaned forward. "Now imagine the opposite version of the same error. A man who has the chance for a life and refuses it because the discipline is what he is good at. Who stays in the office because the office is the room he knows how to be in. Who looks at a woman and a child and decides he does not have the right."
He looked up at me.
"That is also the error, Finn. The same mistake in the opposite shape. Mum knew that one too. Mum spent the last decade of her life in a back room because she had been told she did not have the right to a life. I am not going to repeat her mistake. Not for any reason. Not even for him."
My throat tightened. "Even for him."
"Even for him," Asher said. "And he would say so. Liam would say so."
I put my face in my hands for a second.
When I lowered them I was not steadier. The shame was still there. The thing under the shame was steadier.
"I have been looking at flights," I said. "Tokyo. Anywhere. The work runs from there. I could be gone for months."
He did not blink. "I know you have. Do not."
I gripped the arm of the couch. "Asher —"
"If you leave," he said, and his voice did not rise, it never rose, "I will never forgive you."
The sentence landed flat. I looked at him.
"Tell me why," I said. "Be honest with me, because I am not letting you off this with a word like family. Is it because she needs me here, or because you need me here?"
He did not answer immediately.
"Both," he said finally, and I heard something in his voice I had never heard there before — not vulnerability exactly, but the place where the armour had worn through. "She needs you here. The child needs you here. I need you here. I cannot do this configuration alone. We are both holding it. If you go I drop it."
I pressed my thumb against the bridge of my nose. "Asher."
"That is honest," he said. "You asked." I let the silence stretch.
The shame was running on top of all of it, but underneath the shame was the thing that had been arriving for two days now and that I had been refusing to name to myself.
I do not want to leave. I want to stay. I want to be the one who is on the couch when she comes home. I want to be the one who makes the ponytail. I want to be the one who hears her say my name from the other side of a closed door. I want all of it.
And I am his brother, but he is in the ground. I drank, then set the glass down.
"Asher," I said, and the word in my mouth was not the word I had been intending to say next.
He looked at me. "What?"
"Liam said something to me the night of the bachelor party."
His face did the thing it did when a sentence had landed before the rest of his body had caught up. He went very still.
"What exactly?" he asked, and his voice had gone careful in a way I had only heard from him once before.