Dwayne sat at his desk long before the office filled with life. The city stretched out beyond his window, a grid of glass towers and restless traffic, but none of it calmed him. His tie hung loose around his neck, his coffee sat untouched, and the papers in front of him blurred together as his thoughts circled the same relentless point: Sean and Courtney.
He had told himself he didn't care. That whatever his younger brother did was beneath his concern, and whatever Courtney did in her personal time was irrelevant. But the picture in his head of the two of them at dinner—her laughing at something Sean had said, her eyes warm in candlelight—gnawed at him with a bitterness he couldn't shake. It wasn't even the dinner itself that rattled him. It was that she had gone. She had sat across from Sean, listened, smiled, given him the pieces of herself that Dwayne had been secretly starving for.
