"Dismemberment?" Brad adds.
"Probably both," Damien chimes in, finally surfacing from his phone. "Though knowing Finn, he'd somehow manage to livestream the whole thing for his marketing team."
My phone buzzes in my jacket pocket, but I ignore it. Probably my Colorado team with the survey results. It can wait until I win this hand. "You're all just jealous that my company actually produces something exciting. Unlike, say, corporate restructuring or venture capital."
The phone buzzes again. And again.
I pull the device out, slide my thumb over the screen, and stare at my older brother's name. What does Colton want? Ten years of carefully maintained distance, of building my own empire far from Long Island’s North Fork and the family's sprawling vineyard, and now he's calling like it's nothing? Like I'm still the screwup middle son who could never quite measure up to our father's impossible standards.
I send the call to voicemail and set the phone face up on the felt. Wyatt's knowing smirk says he clocked the whole transaction.
"Looks like someone's getting cold feet about those Colorado powder runs."
"Please." I aim for casual and hit it, because casual is my native language. "The only thing cold will be the champagne I'm drinking slope-side next week while you're all chasing your next acquisitions."
But underneath the ball-busting, the quieter channel is already running its math as Colton’s number rings again. For all our complicated history, my older brother has never once been a man for drama. This many attempts means something's wrong.
"Speaking of cold things," Brad says with a smirk, "remember when Finn tried testing that experimental wingsuit in Alaska..."
My phone vibrates for the third time. I reach for a joke, one about my stodgy eldest sibling discovering speed dial, or one about our mother’s frequent sulking over her dearth of grandchildren, or a joke about anything.
Nothing comes. Empty chamber.
That's the tell I'd never explain to this table. The jokes are my canaries. When they go quiet, whatever's down in the mine is real.
"Deal me out of this hand." I push back from the table, ignoring the raised eyebrows. "I need to take this."
"Everything okay?" Damien's question holds genuine concern beneath the polish.
"Fine. Probably just family business."
"Family business?" Wyatt's eyebrows climb higher. "Since when do you handle anything involving the vineyard?"
"I don't." It comes out sharper than I planned, with ten years of proving I could succeed without the family name pressing on the back of it. "And I'm not starting now."
But as I stride for the door, phone still buzzing in my hand, my swagger thins with every step. Because the last time my brother was this persistent about reaching me, it was to tell me our father had died.
I hit accept just before I clear the doorway. "This better be good, Col. I'm in the middle of..."
"Evan's in the ER."
I stop in the hallway, hand finding the doorframe. Evan's the youngest of us three, the one who still sends me videos of himself doing donuts on the vineyard ATV, and the picture of him in a hospital bed refuses to load right. "Shit. What happened?"
"Broken leg. He came off the storage loft at the winery wrong." Colton's voice holds that same steady calm he's always used to talk me down from ledges, literal and metaphorical. "Clean break, they're casting him now. He'll be home by morning. Mom's freaking out."
Of course she is. "But he's okay?"
"He will be. Look, Finn..." Colton cuts off, and Colton never cuts off. My brother could narrate a barn fire in complete sentences. "I know you've got your own life now, your company to run. But Mom could really use all of us here in Mattichogue. Even if it's just for a couple of weeks."
Two weeks in the hometown. I close my eyes and watch my careful plans unravel on the inside of the lids. The Colorado property. The resort plans. Everything I've built to prove I'm more than the disappointing middle Bardot son.
"Col..."
"He was asking for you. Evan, I mean. Before they took him back to set the leg."
Damn it. Colton knows exactly which buttons to push, because Evan's always been the bridge between us, the easygoing kid brother who never took sides in the long cold war between me and our father.
"Two weeks," Colton adds quietly. "That's all I'm asking. Help me handle Mom, deal with the spring scheduling while Evan's down. Then you can go back to pretending we don't exist."
