POV: Liam
I pushed the door open without knocking.
Asher was at his desk this time, laptop open, a second espresso already going cold at his elbow. He looked up when I came in, registered my jacket, and raised one eyebrow — a single, calibrated degree of skepticism, no more.
"It is not yet eight o'clock," he said.
"I'm aware. Get your jacket."
"Yesterday the face. Today the jacket and the breakfast. You are running a welfare programme, Liam, not a company."
"You're deflecting. Your espresso is cold. Jacket."
He looked at me for a moment — that flat, still assessment he had learned from our father and had spent thirty years pretending he hadn't.
Then he reached for his jacket without another word. He was either too tired to argue or had decided to let me have this one. He picked up the cold espresso and finished it standing, which meant he had already been running on not enough of both sleep and caffeine to tell the difference between the two.
We crossed the street.
The café had been ours for years — the corner booth by the window, the server who had memorised our orders and never asked again, the particular quality of morning quiet it held before the full rush came in.
Asher ordered a double espresso — his third since I had arrived at the office — and a pastry he moved to the edge of his plate and did not touch. I ordered coffee and watched him lower himself into the seat across from me.
He moved carefully, the way he moved when he was rationing himself, when the body was asking for more than the day was going to give it.
"Tell me about London," I said. "Start wherever you want."
And he was off — the full performance, all the beats I had catalogued over years of watching him use it on other people and, less often, on me.
The weather, which was personally offensive. The traffic, which operated according to a logic visible only to people born within the sound of Bow Bells.
The city's fundamental, institutional hostility toward food — the peculiarly British conviction that a meal was improved by being beige, flavourless, and presented without apology — which Asher had strong views about in a way that was genuinely funny if you knew him well enough to understand it was never actually about the food.
I laughed in the right places. He loosened the way he always did when given enough room to be cutting without being challenged — shoulders dropped a fraction, delivery picked up pace, the dry wit that most people in his professional orbit never encountered because they were too busy being managed by him to notice it was there at all.
"Three time zones," he said eventually, wrapping both hands around the fresh espresso the server had brought. "Back and forth for the last two weeks. The flight home landed at two in the morning." He looked at the cup rather than at me. "I had less than three hours before you appeared in my doorway."
"That explains the pallor."
"Listen, I am not unwell, I am not having a crisis of any kind, I am simply a person who has not slept, which is a curable condition that does not require a breakfast intervention and certainly does not require that look you are currently directing at me." He drank. "That is why the face. That is why the coffee. You can stand down."
I let it sit. Gave it enough room for him to believe he had closed it. Then I put my elbows on the table, leaned forward, and let the lightness go entirely out of my voice.
"Why did you come back early, Ash?"
"The work was done. I came home." He set the cup down. "When did you last attend a full board meeting, Liam? Not dial in from the kitchen while Aurora naps. Attend."
I let that land without touching it. "What are you actually carrying?"
"Mind your own business would be the short answer." His voice did not lift, did not shift register at all — flat and even, the way he got when warmth was a resource he had decided not to spend. "The longer one is that if you worked the hours I work, you would look exactly like this. Maybe worse. But you don't, do you."
"Asher—"
"You have been insufferable since Aurora started walking." The delivery was precise, the tone stripped of everything that could be mistaken for affection. "The entire family has noticed. You have a wife, a child, and apparently unlimited time to audit other people's wellbeing. It is a full schedule. I would focus on that."
The tightness in my jaw was not pure anger — it was the grinding frustration of watching a deflection technique work cleanly against you, deployed by the exact person who first showed you how it was done.
"I came here to be a brother," I said. "Not a punchline."
"Then be one from a reasonable distance." He picked up the espresso without looking at me. "I don't need a welfare check, Liam. I need you to trust that I am a grown man who manages his own affairs. Something you used to do as well, before you decided domesticity was a full-time occupation."
I put the money on the table and stood.
On the way out of the booth I reached for his shoulder on pure instinct — the same grip, the same spot, fifteen years of the same gesture without a single conscious thought behind it.
Asher flinched. A quarter-second, the kind that happened before the body's permission had a chance to catch up with the body's response. His shoulder moved a fraction under my hand and then held still, and he did not look up from the table.
I stopped.
The café noise continued around us — orders called, cups set down, a chair scraped across tile somewhere behind me. The pastry sat untouched at the edge of his plate. Asher's hands were flat on the table and he did not meet my eyes.