“Everything okay?” Jon asked, stepping into the office. He stood with his hands in his pants pockets, looking heartily uncomfortable. Will almost enjoyed it, but Jon never stopped in without reason anymore.
“Yes,” he said more tersely than intended.
“Well, good. Why the sudden vacation?” Jon took a seat.
Fuck. They were tracking his vacation requests. The request had been sudden, but it shouldn’t have been cause for alarm. Will had more than enough time built up, and he’d been working his ass off for the last six weeks. “Dad sent you?”
“Do you think it’s a good idea to be taking vacation right now? After everything?” Jon’s voice was strained, but his expression remained stoic.
You mean after everything that you caused? He wanted to say it perhaps more than anything he’d ever wanted to say before, but that would be going backward. All the angry words had been said. There was no reason to rehash them, or so his father reminded him at every opportunity. But there was so much left to say that sometimes it made Will sick. His marriage to Hannah was a new path, one in which his father didn’t see him as a proverbial screwup who couldn’t even keep his girlfriend from sleeping with his brother. Yeah, that had been a Jonathan line for the books, as if his father hadn’t set the bar impossibly high from birth.
“It’s just a vacation. I’m not having a breakdown or doing anything that will embarrass Dad or the company.” He held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
“That would mean more if you were actually a Boy Scout.” Jon laughed and unbuttoned his jacket, a sure sign that this conversation wasn’t over. “Lunch then? I’d love to talk—”
“Actually,” Will said, turning off his monitor and pocketing his cell phone, “I have lunch plans. Thanks for stopping in—totally saved me from being late.”
“How is it that I see you eat the same salad from Susanna’s every day except for the days when I ask you to have lunch?” Sarcasm clung to every word. Underneath it, Will sensed loneliness, but Jon had done this to himself.
“Just unlucky, I guess.” He took his trench coat down from the rack in the corner of his office, folding it over one arm. His brother didn’t move from his chair. Will wanted to leave He didn’t owe Jon anything, but Jon was still his big brother, though he couldn’t say what that meant anymore. “We can have lunch when I’m back. I’ll see what days Daniel has off, and maybe we can make it work. We could go to that place Mom always liked.”
“Valspino’s. We haven’t been there in ages.” The tremor in Jon’s voice was slight. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it, but Will wasn’t most people. He remembered the exact moment that tremor started—the morning she was diagnosed—and all those years later, he was still waiting for it to disappear. Of the three brothers, Jon had held on the hardest, as if retaining his grief proved he loved her the most. There was no telling Jon it wasn’t a competition. Everything was a competition when you were a Thorne.
NOT TEN MINUTES LATER, Will found himself at 28th and Park, a handful of blocks from his younger brother’s hospital. It had become such a routine in the last few months that he didn’t even realize that’s where he was headed until he arrived aboveground. As a second-year resident, Daniel kept a busy schedule, but occasionally he could spare a few minutes or a quick cafeteria sandwich. Even when he wasn’t free, the area had enough restaurants and parks to keep Will occupied for his lunch hour. Sometimes, if he was feeling touristy, he’d head over to the Empire State Building or the Museum of Sex. Once, when he’d needed a particularly long break from the office, he’d gone to see a movie.
Will walked the few blocks to Madison Square Park. He remembered Hannah mentioning that it was one of her city havens. How many times had they just missed each other over the years? Sat on opposite sides of the park? Or shared the same bench a handful of minutes apart? He shot Hannah a quick text about her passport status before sending another message to his brother. He couldn’t tell Daniel. He wanted to, but the less people who knew the truth about Hannah, the more likely his plan would succeed. If he could keep Hannah away from his family for the whole year, he absolutely would. But that wasn’t an option—not with Jon and Madison’s endless wedding events and the family weekends their father insisted on since he stepped down as CEO.
As a family business, Wellington Thorne had been passed down to his father, Jonathan, and uncle, Grayson, when Will’s grandfather had passed. Per the will, the eldest Thorne—Jonathan—would act as CEO for a period of fifteen years, at which time Grayson Thorne would step into the role while Jonathan took over CFO duties. While the transition of power had been peaceful at the beginning of the year, the clout Will’s father still had over the company and the board was undeniable. It was his own father who had tried to have Will fired, and he’d almost succeeded. And even though his father worked remotely from the Hamptons most of the time, letting Jon handle much of the day-to-day work, Will felt his presence more now than when they’d shared an office. Some days, he swore his father was having him followed.
Will’s phone vibrated, alerting him to a text from Daniel. Perfect timing. Meet me at Goodtimes.
Goodtimes was the diner near the hospital. It reminded Will of Doc Magoo’s with its constant flow of doctors and nurses. Daniel hadn’t appreciated the comparison, but that didn’t deter Will from making it every time he stepped into the place. He cut down Twenty-Sixth Street to avoid the madness of Madison and Park and jogged the few blocks up Third to the diner. Daniel stood outside chatting with a man Will recognized as one of his brother’s attendings. He waited for their conversation to end before crossing the street.
“Excuse me, Dr. Carter, is it?” he said, pulling his brother into a hug.
“Dick,” Daniel said with a grin. “What drove you out of the office this time?” he asked as they sat down at a back booth. Daniel reclined as much as he could in the confined space.
“It’s not a what.”
Daniel laughed, but he didn’t open his eyes. Exhaustion etched the lines of his face, heavy bags under his eyes. His scrubs were wrinkled but thankfully clean of any questionable stains. Will wondered how long his shift had been—his brother usually put on a better showing than this.
“You have to give him points for tenacity.” Daniel straightened up at the sound of the waitress’s sneakers against the linoleum. How often did he eat here to recognize the cadence of her steps? “Adele, my love, I need so much coffee.”
Adele appeared to be in her late fifties. She wore the chunky plastic frames of a hipster and a bowling shirt.
“Can’t run only on coffee, doc,” she said amiably.
The smile Daniel gave her was affectionate—he definitely spent too much time at this diner. “I can try, Adele. I can try.”
“All right, dearie—coffee and the usual?”
Daniel nodded.
Will skimmed the menu, already missing his salad from Susanna’s. Maybe he’d stop in on his way back to the office. “Just a coffee for me.”
“Long day?” Will asked after Adele turned to the next table.
“I’ve been on for, like, eighteen hours or something. They asked me to pick up a half shift as I was walking out the door.” He smiled. “It was worth it, though. I got to assist on this really cool surgery.”
As he went into the literally gory details, a storm of affection and envy wrecked Will’s mood. Daniel was exhausted but exhilarated as he went on about human anatomy. That excitement was something Will hadn’t felt in all his time at Wellington Thorne. Will didn’t see that changing anytime soon. Every day under the ever-present gaze of his father’s spies, the proverbial noose tightened. Fresh air became harder to come by. But Daniel had gotten out of the family business and of being a perpetual letdown. Will and Jon had each taken the deal—MBA, JD, or MD in exchange for time in the family business. Daniel had refused and had funded his own way through medical school. Even though he was on the path to becoming a great doctor, Daniel was the black sheep when he should’ve been the golden child. But that was Jonathan Thorne for you, in love first and foremost with his company. Anyone who turned their back on the company turned their back on him.
During his four years of medical school, Daniel hadn’t come home once—he’d wanted to, but he hadn’t been welcome. It was only upon his return to New York, with Jon and Will threatening to walk away from the company, that their father had granted him reprieve. The price for their betrayal had been the mandatory family weekends. If they so wanted to be a family, then dammit, they would act like one.
In the almost eleven years since his mother’s passing, his father hadn’t softened. There’d been that first month, where they’d traveled to several hotel openings as a family, but if anything, without their mother to temper him, Jonathan had become colder and less forgiving. Will had been nineteen when his mother died, in the middle of his freshman year of college at Columbia. Her death had sent him spiraling out of New York. His father had at least given Will his pick of far-off schools where he could find his head and not make too much of a spectacle of himself—or at least far enough away that no one would notice or care. U of I had been perfect for that. And his father had been right—outside of New York, no one cared.
He didn’t remember ever talking about his father with Hannah, at least not in a specific way. He had whined about the weight of expectation. She had countered with stories of suburbia and parents who were involved but not orchestrating. But he couldn’t tell her what her parents did for a living or even their first names. He should probably find that out if they were going to be his in-laws, though he suspected Hannah’s parents weren’t quite as googleable as Jonathan Thorne.
“Uh-oh.”
Daniel’s voice pulled Will’s focus back to the conversation. He only hoped the goriest of details had passed. But Daniel’s story was long over, and his gaze was fixed on Will.
“What?” Will asked, grabbing a fry out of the to-go container Daniel had his food delivered in. It was easier for a quick exit, he’d said.
“You have that ‘I’m going to do something incredibly stupid, and yes, it definitely involves a woman’ look.”
Will trained his expression back to neutral. “Whether it is incredibly stupid is yet to be seen, but there is a woman.”
