Chapter 3

We went to the same university because I made sure of it, applied to the school he'd already committed to and told him it was a coincidence. He believed me. Why wouldn't he? I had never once, in years, given him a reason to check my version of events against anything, and I intended to keep it that way for as long as it served me.

Four more years of proximity. A standing Sunday dinner he insisted on even during exams. Mike had a roommate that first year, a guy named Tobias who Mike liked well enough that they stayed friends the whole four years, and I made a point of being around often enough that Tobias eventually stopped inviting Mike to things without also inviting me.

"You could come out with us sometime,"

Mike told me once, in second year, catching me hovering near his dorm room door on a Friday night. "You don't have to just be my little brother tagging along at Sunday dinner."

"I like Sunday dinner," I said, which was true, and also not the whole truth.

"Tobias thinks it's weird you're always around," he said, not unkindly. "I told him you just don't have a big friend group here yet."

"Do you think it's weird?"

"No," he said immediately, the way he answered most things about me. "You're my brother. Why would that be weird."

"Some people would think it's weird," I said, testing something I didn't have a name for yet.

"Some people didn't grow up the way we did," he said, and clapped me on the shoulder, and went back inside to get ready for whatever party I wasn't invited to, and I stood in that hallway a long moment before I made myself leave.

I built a private definition of the word close enough to hold everything I couldn't say out loud, and I lived inside it as if it were enough.

Our father visited campus once unannounced, during my third year, one of maybe two visits in four years of school.

He took the two of us to a steak dinner and spent most of it on his phone, looking up only to ask Mike, out of nowhere, if he'd thought about what came after graduation.

"I'm applying for a few graduate programs," Mike said. "Some abroad, some not."

"Good," my father said. "Get out there. See the world before you're stuck behind a desk like me." He said it as he shook his phone to state the obvious.

"You should come visit wherever I end up," Mike said to me later, walking back to the dorms, half-joking. "Give you a reason to leave this city for once."

"Maybe I will," I said, already turning the idea over, already deciding I would find a way to make it true no matter how it had to happen.

Then, the spring before graduation, he told me over dinner "I got the scholarship," he said. "The one for the graduate program abroad. Full ride. Five years."

"That's incredible," I said, and my voice didn't shake. "You have to take it."

"You think so?"

"Mike. Obviously you're taking it."

He hugged me across the table, knocking over a glass of water neither of us bothered to clean up. "I couldn't have done any of this without you," he said into my shoulder. "You know that, right?"

"I know," I said.

I drove him to the airport myself, three months later. At the gate he hugged me hard enough to hurt.

"Five years isn't that long," he said.

"No," I said. "It isn't."

I sat in the parking garage for forty minutes after his plane cleared the runway before I trusted my hands to drive. I didn't cry in front of him. I gave myself that much.

I flew out once, in year two, on a trip I called a work conference that happened to be in his city. Three days. The best three days I'd had since he left, and the worst three, because I had to watch him say goodbye a second time. I spent most of that flight home rehearsing reasons I might have to go back sooner than planned, none of which I ever actually used, because even I understood there was a limit to how often a work conference could conveniently land in the same city as my brother.

"You didn't have to fly all this way just for a few days," he said at the gate.

"I wanted to see you," I said. "That's not a crime."

"No," he said, laughing, "it's not."

I built a company from nothing in the years he was gone, just to have something that was mine when the thing I actually wanted was eleven time zones away. In year four, on a call that started ordinary, Mike said a name I hadn't heard before.

"Her name's Sarah," he said, testing the shape of it in his own mouth. "I think this one's serious, Luke."

"Yeah?" I said. "Tell me about her."

He did. For twenty minutes, how they'd met at a lecture, how she'd corrected his French in front of the whole room and he'd found it charming instead of humiliating, how she wanted to meet the brother he never stopped talking about. I listened to every word and hated every one of them individually.

"You'll like her," Mike said, near the end.

"She reminds me a little of you, actually. Stubborn. Won't let anything go once she's decided it matters."

"Sounds terrifying," I said, keeping my voice light.

"You'll come to the wedding, right? Whenever that ends up being."

"You guys should take it slow" I joked "But ofcourse wouldn't miss it for the world."

I told him I was happy for him. I hung up the phone and put my fist through the wall in my hallway hard enough to split two knuckles, and paid a contractor the next morning to fix it before anyone saw. My mood soured throughout that week and I already had a plan for the not-so-lucky bride.