Page 85 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

"I don't say things I don't mean."

"I know that about you," I say.

"It's one of the things I trust most."

He nods once. The subject closes — not dismissed, just settled. We sit with it for a moment and then I ask the question that's been forming in the back of my mind since the first week I worked for him.

"Were you married before?"

He doesn't flinch.

"Yes." He picks up his wine glass.

"Her name was Giselle. We were married for three years. It endedten years ago."

"What happened?"

"I was building the company," he says.

"That was all I was doing. She needed someone who came home — really came home, not just physically present. I wasn't that person."

He's matter of fact about it. No performance of pain, no bitterness. Just the clean accounting of a man who has had a decade to understand his own role in something.

"She was lonely. I was absent. We turned each other into people neither of us wanted to be."

"Do you have any contact with her now?"

"No." He says it simply.

"We parted cleanly. There was nothing left to maintain."

I look at him. "Do you regret it? The marriage?"

He thinks about it — actually thinks, doesn't reach for the easy answer.

"I regret what I did to her," he says finally.

"I don't regret that it ended. We weren't right for each other. I just didn't know how to admit that until there was nothing left to admit it to."

I nod. I take a sip of wine.

"Can I ask you something else?"

"You can ask me anything."

"Did you think you'd ever do it again? After Giselle?"

He looks at me steadily. "No," he says.

"For a long time — no."

The wordfor a long timesits between us. Neither of us addresses it directly. Neither of us needs to.

"What about you?" he asks.

"Before San Francisco. Before all of this. What did you want?"

The question catches me slightly — not because it's hard but because no one has asked it that plainly in a long time.