Page 11 of Never Enough

chapter

four

Henry

After leaving Gracie at her house, I run a few errands—namely one to buy new sheets and towels since I’ll have a woman living with me—then drive home.

I find Oliver, my brother, who currently lives with me, where I always find him.

On my couch. In my living room. In the house that has my name on the deed and my bourbon in the cabinet and—as of approximately two hours ago—a wife who needs to move into it.

He's got his laptop open on the coffee table and a glass of something amber that I'm fairly certain came from the bottle I was saving for a specific occasion. His socks are on my hardwood. His charger is plugged into my outlet. His jacket is draped over the back of my chair—not a chair, my chair—with the casual entitlement of a man who has been making himself at home in other people's spaces since birth.

Oliver has always been the Blankenship who lands softly. The rest of us hit the ground and figure it out. Oliver just... glides into the nearest available surface and settles, like a cat finding a sunbeam. He did it at our parents' place for twenty-four years. He did it at his college roommate's apartment for three. And for the last fourteen months, he's been doing it here, in my guest room that was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while he “figured out his next move.”

Fourteen months.

His next move appears to be my couch.

I close the front door behind me and stand in the entryway for a second, running a hand over my jaw. The evening air is still clinging to my shirt—Hill Country heat and the faint, sweet ghost of Gracie's shampoo from when she pressed her face into my chest in the bakery parking lot and wondered what we’d just done. I’d told her then that we’d figure it out.

We'll figure it out.

Step one: get my brother out of my house.

“Hey,” Oliver says without looking up. He's reading something on his laptop. “There's leftover Thai in the fridge. The pad see ew is mine. Everything else is fair game.”

“We need to talk.”

That gets him to look up.

Oliver has a finely calibrated radar for tone. It probably stems from him being the middle son, right between me and Payton. He can hear the difference between we need to talk meaning the dishwasher is broken again and we need to talk meaning something has fundamentally shifted and you need to pay attention.

He closes the laptop. Slowly.

“That's never a good sentence,” he says.

I walk into the kitchen, grab two beers from the fridge. The Limestone longnecks dangle from my fingers as I head back into my living room. I set both bottles on the coffee table.

Oliver watches this with careful attention. I sit in the armchair across from him—my chair, the one with his jacket on it, which I pick up and move to the side table with a deliberateness that I hope communicates something—and take a long pull off my beer.

“I got married,” I say.

Oliver doesn't move.

He doesn't blink.

He doesn't set the bottle down, stand up, or make a sound.

He just... stalls. Like a computer processing a file that’s corrupted. Three full seconds of absolute, uncharacteristic stillness from a man who always has a response loaded and ready.

“I'm sorry?” he finally asks.

“I got married. To Gracie.”

Another beat.

He glances at his watch. “Like today? You just got married?”