"I'm not moping. I'm drinking."
"You're moping while drinking. There's a diagnostic difference. Moping drinkers check their phones obsessively hoping for a text from a specific person, and you've checked yours nine times since I started counting."
I put my phone face down on the table.
"I saw that," Luca said.
"You see everything. Has anyone told you it's exhausting?"
"Wes tells me daily. I choose to interpret it as a compliment." He sat down across from me and the sitting was deliberate, weighted with intention. His face shifted from sunshine mode to something more serious. "Are you seeing anyone, Jonah?"
The question landed differently than casual. Luca's voice had dropped half an octave and the warmth in it was not thebroadcast warmth he gave the room. It was the targeted warmth he gave the people he was trying to help.
"No."
"Hmm." He tilted his head. "You've got that look, though."
"What look?"
"The look of a man who's already taken and hasn't figured it out yet."
I stared at my beer. The condensation was running down the glass in rivulets and I watched them because watching condensation was easier than meeting Luca Moretti's eyes, which were brown and warm and saw too much.
The silence extended. Luca did not fill it. This was his secret weapon, the thing that made him devastating as a confidant: he could be loud enough to fill any room and quiet enough to empty one, and the quiet was where the real work happened.
"It's been ten years," I said.
He didn't ask ten years of what. He just nodded. The nod of a man whose suspicion had been confirmed and whose confirmation was both expected and devastating in its implications.
"Since I was sixteen. Since he was fourteen. Since a dock and a laugh and my entire life rearranging itself around a person who doesn't know."
"Cole's brother."
"Cole's brother."
Luca let out a breath that was slow and long and carried the weight of genuine empathy. "Jonah. That's a very long time to carry something alone."
"I know."
"And he's living in your apartment."
"I know."
"And you bought him a reading lamp because of something he said at Thanksgiving five years ago."
I looked up. "How do you know about the lamp?"
"I didn't until right now. But the expression on your face just confirmed it."
I almost laughed despite myself. Luca was diabolical in the most benevolent way possible, the kind of man who could disarm you with a guess and then hold the information with such care that you were grateful rather than angry.
"Have you told anyone?" he asked. "Before right now?"
"No."
"Not Cole?"
"Especially not Cole."