Torn between my stepbrother and his bestfriend

The photograph was of her.

I was an old one, three years ago at minimum and she recognized the dress, a green wrap she had donated to charity two winters back. She was leaving a restaurant she hadn't visited since. Alone. The shot was taken from across the street, slightly elevated, with the practiced distance of someone who knew what they were doing.

On the back, four words in the same handwriting as the envelope.

He's been watching you.

She looked up.

Gerald was still in the doorway, eyes on her face, reading her the way he always did, quietly and completely.

"What is it?" he asked.

NShe turned the photograph face down on the desk. "Nothing."

"Gladys."

"nothing, Gerald." She kept her voice level. "Thank you for bringing it up."

He looked at her for a long moment, the particular look that meant he knew she was lying and had decided to let her, then nodded once and left.

She waited until his footsteps faded down the corridor. Then she picked up the photograph and looked at it again.

She knew the restaurant, ur was Cielo on Mercer Street. She had gone there on a second date with a man named Patrick Reeves an architect, kind, genuinely funny, the last person she had allowed herself to want before she stopped trying altogether.

The relationship lasted four months and ended without explanation. Patrick had sent one text: I'm sorry, I can't do this. She had spent six months turning herself inside out trying to understand why.

She turned the photograph over again.

He's been watching you.

Her first instinct was to dismiss it because it was anonymous, the kind of thing a disgruntled employee sent to cause chaos on someone's first day.

Her second instinct said something else entirely. She locked the photograph in her desk drawer, picked up her bag, and went to find Dave.

His office was at the end of the executive corridor, floor-to-ceiling glass, the kind of room that announced itself before you walked in. His door was open. He was at his desk, jacket off, reading something on his screen with the focused intensity he brought to everything.

He looked up when she appeared. "You're early, dinner isn't until"

"Who is Patrick Reeves to you?" She asked.

The question landed cleanly. She watched his face, the slight stillness, the fraction of a second before the neutral expression settled back into place and knew before he said a word.

"Patrick Reeves," he repeated.

"The man I dated three years ago. The one who ended things without explanation." She stepped into the office and closed the door behind her. "Do you know him?"

"I know of him." Dave leaned back in his chair. "He worked with an architectural firm that pitched for the Stone Centre development. It didn't go anywhere."

"Did you speak to him? Personally?"

There was a pause. "We may have had a conversation."

The careful language of it, may have a conversation made her chest tighten. "About me."

"About the situation."

"Dave." Her voice was quiet. The tone she used when the alternative was something she couldn't take back. "Did you tell him to end things with me?"

He met her eyes. "I told him the truth about what getting involved with a Stone family member would mean professionally. I didn't threaten him. I gave him information and let him make his own choice."

"And he chose his career."

"He chose his career," Dave said simply, like it proved his point rather than hers.

Gladys stood very still.

She had spent six months after Patrick believing she was too much, too guarded, complicated, shaped by a family that made ordinary relationships impossible. She had rebuilt herself around that story and had used it as the reason she stopped reaching for things she wanted.

The story was a lie Dave had written for her and never mentioned.

"How many?" she asked.

"Gladys"

"How many times have you done this?"

"I've done what was necessary to protect"

"How many times, Dave."

The silence told her it was more than once.

She nodded slowly, the tightness in her chest had resolved into something colder and more useful. "I see."

"You don't." He stood. "You have no idea what people in this world would do to get to me through you. Patrick Reeves was not who he presented himself to be, I had him looked into and what I found"

"You had him investigated."

"I had him researched, there's a difference."

"There isn't." She picked up her bag from the chair. "I'm not coming to dinner tonight."

"Gladys." His voice sharpened. "We need to talk about this properly."

"We just did." She opened the door. "I'll have the Hartley deck on your system by Wednesday morning."

She walked out before he could respond.

She took the stairs instead of the elevator, twenty-eight floors, which was either impressive self-discipline or a complete inability to stand in a small enclosed space for thirty seconds without screaming or probably both.

By the time she hit the lobby her breathing was steady and her face was composed and the photograph in her locked desk drawer was all she could think about.

He's been watching you.

It was not Dave because the pronoun felt deliberate, specific, directed at someone other than the obvious choice.

Dave's overprotectiveness was not a secret to anyone who had spent five minutes in a room with both of them. Whoever sent the photograph wasn't telling her something she didn't know. They were telling her something she hadn't looked at yet.

She pushed through the revolving door into the evening air and stopped. Gerald was outside, leaning against the building with his phone in his hand.

"I waited."

"Why?"

He pushed off the wall and looked at her with the directness she had never known what to do with. "Because you came out of Dave's office looking like someone had rewritten your history and I wanted to make sure you were alright."

"I'm fine."

"I know you are." He fell into step beside her without being invited. "That's not what I asked."

She walked half a block in silence. He matched her pace without filling it and she thought, not for the first time, that his ability to exist in silence without making it uncomfortable was one of the most specifically annoying things about him.

"The photograph," she said finally. "Do you know who sent it?"

"No." He paused. "But I have a suspicion."

She stopped walking. Turned to face him. "Tell me."

He looked at her for a moment, weighing something, she could see him weighing it and then he said: "Not here. Not on the street." He glanced back toward the building. "There's something you need to know about why I was in that building today. It wasn't a board meeting."

Her stomach tightened. "Then what was it?"

He held her gaze.

"I came because three days ago someone sent me a photograph too," he said quietly. "Different image, same handwriting."

She stared at him.

"What was in yours?" she asked.

He reached into his jacket pocket and held it out.

She took it, unfolded it, and felt the ground shift beneath her feet.