POV: Finn
The restaurant was halfway up the hill behind the villa, in a low stone room with a fire going in a corner that did not need a fire and a long table set for four.
Liam was at the head of it.
He was relaxed in the specific way I had not seen him relaxed in years — not since before our mother had stopped being a person and become a story.
His shoulders were down. His hands were doing that loose, half-gesturing thing they did when he was telling a story he was enjoying.
I sat to his left and watched him. This is what he is supposed to look like.
The thought arrived clean, without ceremony. It was the kind of thought I did not used to be able to have without tearing something on the way to it.
Asher was opposite me, with his good arm around the back of his chair, listening to Liam the way he always listened to Liam — quiet, attentive, with the small private warmth he did not show anyone else.
Leo was next to him, eyes a little wet on and off through the meal, a man holding something against his ribs that he was not going to explain to us tonight. He is going to ask her. Good.
We ate. We drank. We did not toast in any organized way — Liam refused to be the centre of a thing — and instead we kept circling back to it, the way men did, in small jokes and small admissions.
"Tell me what you are going to do with the rest of your life," I said, when the plates had been cleared.
Liam tilted his glass, amused. "That is a big question for the cheese course."
I leaned back in my chair. "You signed up for the cheese course."
He laughed. He took a slow drink. He looked across the table at Asher and back at me.
"I am going to be present," he said. "That is the whole plan. I am going to wake up next to her every day. I am going to be in the car at school pickup until Aurora is too embarrassed to be picked up by her father. I am going to keep my hands off the company unless somebody specifically asks me to put them back on. I am going to be — there. Where I am. With them."
"That is not a plan," Asher said, the corner of his mouth pulling. "That is a posture."
Liam shrugged, unbothered. "I will take the posture."
"He will not come back to the company," I told Asher. "I have offered. He has refused. Three times now."
"Four," Liam said, lifting a finger.
I gestured at him. "Four. He is not going back. He means it."
Liam met my eyes across the table. "I mean it."
I looked at him. I felt something rise up in my chest then, and I let it. Love. Plain love. The brother kind, with no qualifiers on it.
And underneath the love, quiet but not hidden — the older thing. The one I had set down.
I had loved her. I still did. I had not made a show of it in a long time, because making a show of it would have cost the family I had built around her, and the family was the point.
I had taken what I felt for Jasmine and I had folded it up small and put it inside my chest behind my ribs, and most days I did not take it out, and on the days I did, I put it back.
That was the discipline. That was the choice.
The choice tonight, watching my brother lit up at the head of the table, was easier than it had been in years.
The real love is to let the person you love be happy. Even when the happy is not with you. Especially then.
I lifted my glass. I did not say anything out loud. I did not need to.
Liam caught my eye across the table and lifted his back, the small private one, the lift between brothers that did not require a sentence, and we drank.
The rest of the night was easy. The fire burned down. Leo got quietly drunk. Asher laughed twice, which from him was a standing ovation. Liam told a story about Aurora insisting Wednesdays were not real days, and I laughed so hard I had to put my hand flat on the table to steady myself.
We closed the place down with the staff smiling at us from the doorway.
We slept upstairs at the inn above the restaurant. We were due at the villa for the ceremony in the morning.
I woke before any of them. I always did.
The sky over the hills was the kind of pale gold that only happened in that part of the world before the sun had fully come up, and the air on the small balcony was cool and clean and smelled like the rosemary growing in pots along the wall.
I drank my coffee standing.
She is going to walk down a path in a few hours. He is going to be at the end of it. I am going to stand next to him.
The thought did not hurt the way it once would have. It sat in me clean. The discipline had become a peace.
The cars came up the drive at the time we had asked them to.
Liam came out of the inn first, in jeans and a clean shirt, hair still damp. Asher behind him with his cast in the sleeve of his jacket. Leo behind them both, looking like a man who had not slept and did not regret it.
"In the first car?" Liam said, hand on the open door.
I waved him forward. "Take it. I will follow."
He paused, reading me. "You sure?"
"I am sure," I told him, and something in my chest pulled tight and released. "Get there. Do not be late to your own wedding."
He laughed as he got in. Asher slid in beside him. Leo took the third seat with the small box still in his jacket pocket — I saw him touch it without thinking — and the doors closed.
I had taken one step toward the second car when my phone went.
The number on the screen was the contracts desk. The contracts desk did not call at this hour for anything that could wait. I lifted the phone to my ear and waved the first car off with my free hand.
The driver pulled away. The car went down the gravel and out onto the road and turned the corner past the cypress at the end of the drive and was gone.
"Finn," the voice on the phone said. "I am sorry. We have a problem with the Berlin clause —"
I turned away from the road. "Walk me through it."
I stood on the gravel in the early gold light with the phone at my ear and listened to a man on the other side of the world talk about a clause that had seemed fine yesterday and was not fine this morning.
It took maybe two minutes. I did not hear the sound at first.
It came from the direction of the road past the cypress. It was not immediately identifiable — a single dull thump, low, somewhere in the chest of the hill, the kind of sound you could mistake for a delivery truck dropping a crate, or a door slamming, or a backfire.
Then it stopped. There was no second sound after it. The man on the phone was still talking, but I lowered the phone.