Chapter 4

Five years changes a person. I got off the plane with a job offer waiting and a ring already on Sarah's finger, taller in every sense that actually matters, more certain of myself than I'd been at any other point in my life up to then. Luke picked us up from the airport himself, in a car that cost more than the house we grew up in.

"Look at you," I said, pulling him into a hug at the curb, ignoring the honking behind us. "You built all this yourself?" I meant it as a simple compliment, and only later understood how much of what he'd built had been constructed, in some part, around the specific shape of my absence.

"Some of it," he said, which I later learned was Luke for all of it

"I'm so proud of you," I told him.

"Look at you," he said back, and held on a beat longer than a hug usually lasts. I didn't think anything of it.

"So where are we headed?" Sarah asked, once we were in the car. "Hotel first, or straight to the apartment listings?"

"You're not staying in a hotel," Luke said, checking his mirror, merging into traffic like the decision had already been made days ago. "And there's no rush looking for an apartment. I've got more than enough room. Stay with me until you're settled. It makes no sense to waste money on a place you'll be too busy to enjoy the first few months anyway."

"Luke, we can't just move into your house," Sarah said, laughing a little, glancing at me like she expected me to back her up.

"Why not," he said. "It's not an inconvenience. I like having people around." He caught my eye in the rearview mirror for exactly one second, long enough that I felt it without being able to name why. "Besides. I've missed you. I'm not in a hurry to hand you straight back to an empty apartment on your first night home."

I should have found something in that strange. I didn't. Instead I found it generous, the way I'd found almost everything about Luke generous for as long as I could remember.

"See," I told Sarah, squeezing her hand, "this is what I mean. He's like this with everyone."

"He's not like this with everyone," she said, quiet enough that only I heard it, and I laughed it off the way I laughed off most things that first week, still jet-lagged, still riding the high of being home.

He gave us the wing on the far side of the house, two rooms and a shared bathroom, close enough to the rest of the place that I could hear him some nights moving around the kitchen at odd hours, and far enough that it never once occurred to me to ask why a man with a house that size needed to be awake and pacing at two in the morning.

He took us to dinner our first week back and raised a glass.

"To Mike," he said, "and to Sarah, for putting up with him."

"To both of you," Sarah said, laughing, "for finally letting me meet the famous brother. He talks about you constantly, you know. Luke this, Luke that. I used to get a little jealous."

"Don't be jealous," Luke said, smiling at her over his glass. "There's plenty of him to go around."

"So what's it actually like," Sarah asked, leaning forward, "growing up with parents who were never there? Mike doesn't talk about it much. He just gets quiet."

"You learn to fill in the gaps yourself," Luke said. "Or someone fills them in for you."

"Is that what you did for him?" she asked, glancing at me. "Filled in the gaps?"

"All of them," Luke said, and something in the flatness of it should have landed harder than it did. "I didn't leave much room for anyone else to."

"You're a good brother," Sarah said, raising her glass again. "I mean that."

Luke smiled at me across the table in a way I read, at the time, as simple warmth, nothing more complicated than a man happy his brother was finally home.

Later that night, in the room down the hall from Luke's, Sarah pulled me close and kept her voice low, out of some instinct she never explained.

"He's protective of you," she said. "It's sweet."

"We've been joined at the hip since we were kids," I said. "Our parents were never around."

"Well, I like him," she said. "Even if he looked at me a little weird at dinner."

"Weird how?"

"I don't know. When you were toasting him back, he watched your face the whole time, not the glass. Like he was checking something." She went quiet a second, and then, softer: "Also, this house is enormous, and I still heard him walk past our door twice last night."

"It's an old house. Floors creak."

"Twice, Mike. Stopping outside the door. Not walking past it."

"He's probably just checking if the house is locked up," I said, already half asleep, already choosing the way I would choose a hundred more times without noticing, the explanation that let me stop thinking about it.

Weeks folded into each other. Luke and Sarah developed an easy rhythm on the surface, Sunday brunches, a running joke about his taste in ties, but underneath it, something in Sarah kept quietly recalibrating. She started closing our bedroom door fully instead of leaving it cracked. She stopped changing in front of the mirror that faced the hallway. She never said why, and I never asked, because some part of me had already decided I didn't want the answer badly enough to go looking for it.

"Does Luke ever date anyone?" she asked me once, weeks in, folding laundry. "You never mention anyone. He never brings anyone home. In a house this size, you'd think—"

"He works too much," I said. "He'll find someone eventually."

"It's just, he watches you sometimes. The way you'd watch someone you were scared of losing. Not the way you watch a little brother you're proud of. The other way."

"He missed me," I said again. "Five years, Sarah."

"Yeah," she said, and let it go, folding a shirt with more force than the task required.

Our mother called once that first month, one of maybe three calls she made a year.

"You're home safe, then," she said, like I'd been on a long errand rather than gone five years. "Staying with Luke, I hear."

"Just until we find our own place," I said.

"Lovely," she said, already sounding distracted. "He's always been devoted to you. Well. I have to run, darling. So glad you're home."

She hung up before I could say goodbye. I stood there a moment with the dead phone in my hand. Down the hall, I could hear Luke's voice through the wall, low, and Sarah's, lower, the two of them talking about something I couldn't make out, in a house that had somehow already stopped feeling like somewhere I was only passing through. I had exactly six weeks left with her, though I had no way of knowing that yet, and I spent every one of them asleep three doors down from the man who was already deciding how the rest of my life was going to go.