Page 128 of Dial F for Finance

Logan rolls his eyes. “Then at least let me buy you lunch.”

I check my watch. Hailey is due to land this afternoon and will go straight to her one-on-one final interview with Field at The Metropolitan Club. Jenna is collecting her afterward for the emergency fitting, then taking her out to dinner for sisterly bonding. Which means, without my wife to chase around and lust after, I’m forced to focus on work. I have time before my next conference call anyway.

I snap the stylus back into its magnetic holder on my desk. “Lunch is acceptable,” I say, offering a magnanimous nod. “But if you try to slip my firm a retainer fee disguised as a tip, I’m legally obligated to have you escorted from the premises.”

Logan huffs, standing and brushing invisible lint off his trousers. “I wouldn’t use a restaurant receipt. I’d wire it directly to your operating account. Obviously.”

“Obviously.” I stand, grabbing my suit jacket from the back of my chair. “We’re going to O’Malley’s. I need a burger and a side of cheese curds, and you need an environment where nobody cares about your net worth or your mother’s standing in the ladies’ auxiliary.”

“O’Malley’s is acceptable,” Logan says, already moving toward the door. His brain is likely already recalibrating his afternoon schedule to factor in grease and cheese curds. But then he pauses in the frame, turning back with that damn earnestness creeping into his expression again. “I just . . . I appreciate it, Dominic. The perimeter management.”

My jaw tightens. I hate the sincerity. It itches. I clap a heavy hand on his shoulder as I brush past him into the hallway, physically steering him forward so we don’t have to maintain eye contact.

“Asset protection, Whitman. Standard operating procedure,” I say smoothly, locking my office door behind us. “Now move, before I start calculating the billable hours for this conversation.”

An hour later, I’m chalking a cue under the half-dead neon that has only said MALL for years while a basket of cheese curds does its sacred work between us, and my best friend since college breaks the rack like he’s punishing it for something.

O’Malley’s doesn’t change. That’s its entire value proposition. Sticky floor, taxidermied walleye of dubious provenance, a broken jukebox, and a bartender named Jake who has never once found any of us interesting. I have negotiated in palaces. I’m at my best here.

We play one game in easy silence, the kind Logan and I earned years ago. He wins it. I don’t let him. He’s just gotten better since he started dating a woman who calculates angles out loud for fun.

He’s racking for the second game when he says, “I need to log a grievance.”

“Formally?”

“It’s been in the queue for a while.” He sets the rack, lifts it clean, and stands there turning the cue ball in his hand like it’s helping him load the words. “You got married, Dominic. And I found out from a group chat, from Jenna, at the same time as everyone else, in the same thread as our taco night RSVP.” He places the cue ball on the felt, very precisely. “You flew to Boston when my defense committee tried to gut my dissertation. You’re the emergency contact in my phone. And my information about the most important thing that ever happened to you came through the same channel as Caleb’s legal memes.”

The cheese curds sit there. The tinny Bluetooth speakers that stand in for the jukebox play Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

“I’m not angry,” he adds, frowning at the table. “I ran it down. It’s not anger. It’s—there’s a word Audrey gave me. Hurt. It’s hurt. I’m hurt you didn’t come to me.”

“You’re right,” I say, setting my cue down. “And I’m sorry. I need you to hear the whole shape of it, though, because it wasn’t an oversight. I wanted to tell you so badly it was bursting out of me. The night we landed back from Tokyo, I drove past your place. Twice. I had the whole confession loaded.” I lean against the table. “And then I thought about what I’d actually be handing you. A secret. From Audrey. Every dinner, every night you two ran your little probability arguments across the kitchen, every time she said my name or Jenna’s—you’d have been holding it. Lying by omission to the person you love most, on my behalf, for however long it took for Jenna to come around. I know exactly what carrying things costs, Logan. I wasn’t going to invoice you for mine.”

Logan is quiet for a moment. He lines up the break, doesn’t take it, straightens back up.

“I would have carried it,” he says. “You’re the brother I never had. I would have carried it badly—I’d have developed a facial tic and Audrey would have diagnosed me inside four days—but I would have carried it. And for the record, she would have understood. She kept your lipstick evidence out of the group chat for a whole morning once. She has discretion. It’s selective, but it exists.”

“I know she would have.” I take a sip of beer. “And that’s why I love you, kid. Both of you. And it’s also exactly why I didn’t tell you. You’re the best person I know, Logan. Holding a secret from the people you care about would have eaten you alive one calorie at a time, and you’d have done it anyway, without complaint, because I asked. So I didn’t ask.” I shrug, and it comes out heavier than a shrug. “Protecting people from the cost of loving me is a lifelong habit I’m told I need to work on. My wife has notes. My brother has even more.”

“Dustin’s notes are correct,” Logan says. “He told me he’s getting driving lessons. That’s pretty cool.”

I smile, thinking about how happy he was when I found the program for him. “It really is.”

He bends, finally takes the break—clean, brutal, two stripes down—and while I’m still thinking about Dusty and how great Jenna was with my family, he says, “Grievance withdrawn, by the way. Logged, heard, closed. That’s how it works, apparently. Audrey taught me. It’s an unbelievably efficient protocol; I don’t know why nobody documented it sooner.”

We play. He runs the table for a while and I eat the curds and heckle, and it’s the easiest hour I’ve had since Connecticut—no room to manage, no volume to set, just the brother I chose in my twenties when he was a friendless kid with a grade-hacking racket and the loneliest eyes I’d ever seen, beating me at pool under a broken sign.

He misses an easy eight-ball. Deliberately. Then he stands the cue on its end, holds it with both hands like a staff, and looks at me like there’s something else he’s not telling me.

“What’s on your mind, professor?”

“I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while, but I wasn’t sure if now was a good time—what with your sixty-day trial marriage almost up and⁠—”

“What do you mean the sixty days are almost up?”

“Next Thursday.” Logan pushes his glasses up his nose, blinking at me as if I’ve just failed a basic arithmetic test. “That’s sixty days after you two started wearing the rings.”

I stare at him, the half-eaten cheese curd suddenly turning to lead in my stomach. Thursday. My brain forcefully reboots, scrambling through the calendar—we’d been so busy with work and family and prepping for the gala that I didn’t even realize . . .