When We're Thirty Casey Dembowski (the chimp paradox .TXT) 📖

Muffled background static came across the line, followed by garbled speech, but it sounded more professional than secretive. Maybe his imagination was spot-on.

“Listen, I gotta go—impatient singer and all. But beaches are always nice,” she said at lightning speed before hanging up.

A beach. Well, that narrowed it down and put him right back where he started. Turks, Maui, Tahiti. He pulled up the list of luxury hotels again—Hilton Head or Antigua? He opened the weather app on his phone. There didn’t appear to be any hurricane warnings for the next week as of yet. Antigua. It was quiet and one of their nicest resorts. Hannah would love it. Assuming she had a passport still. He wrote himself a note to ask before he bought the tickets.

The unmistakable clearing of his older brother’s throat caught Will’s attention. Jon stood in the doorway in a perfectly pressed suit. It fit better than any suit he’d ever worn before. The Madison effect. It had happened to Will too.

“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