Page 42 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

“And I can marketyouand your art. We could start with shoots with my phone. Show people what you actually do and build you a following.” She pauses. “How online are you currently?”

I hate all that stuff, so… “Barely.”

She looks me up and down. Head to toe, which Ifeelmore than see, and then she lets out a quick breath and says, “You would do very well online.”

“Meaning you like what you see?” I ask, flirting before I mean to.

She rolls her eyes and shoves my shoulder. It’s the first time she’s touched me since that morning. It’s nothing, just a shoulder shove, but I feel it through my whole arm and then further through my entire body.

Hands off.

“I’m saying you might gather an adoring public which translates to real money,” she says. “For you and for me.”

“So you want to use me as your cash cow.” I can’t hold back my grin now.

“Only if you want to be.” She bites at her thumbnail, which I’ve noticed she does when she’s thinking. “I had a waiting list before all this. It’s not poaching if they were never officially signed.”

She looks up, a sudden frown creasing her brow. “But if you’re my client, it would mean we’d be spending more time together… which might be?—”

“A bad idea,” I finish for her.

I mean it.

I do mean it.

She’s Jake’s wife—his ex-wife, his almost-ex-wife, whatever—and I drew her face in my sketchbook like a seventeen-year-old with a crush. And she may or may not have seen it. And we spentone night together that I have been very carefullynotthinking about for two days. More time together is objectively a bad idea.

“Probably,” she agrees.

Neither of us moves.

“Where were you?” she asks suddenly. “The last two days.”

She immediately follows up with a full-body wince and, “Sorry, you don’t have to?—”

“With my son,” I say.

The words land in the space between us.

The moment Owen enters the picture is usually the moment I watch people recalibrate what they think they know about me.

Most women do one of two things: they get warmer in the performative way ofoh how sweetand then start romanticizing me in ways that are nothing even close to accurate. Or they get cooler in a way that means they’re doing math about complications.

I’ve learned to read either reaction fast.

Owen is not a detail. Owen is the whole center.

Lennon does neither of those things.

She goes still and tilts her head with a complicated look on her face that’s half softness and half some sort of sadness I can’t quite put my finger on, and asks, “How old?”

“Four.”

“Yeah?” A small smile. Just a real, unmanaged one, like she’s imagining my son out there as a real little human. “What’s his name?”

“Owen.”

She repeats it softly, like she’s trying it out. “Owen.”