Lauren stopped a few feet short, as if there were a line on the floor only she could see.
“This is Derek,” she said. “This is Mason. You were right. I should have— this is Jonah.”
Jonah looked at Derek the way a person looks at a door that might be locked from the other side. He did not offer a handshake. Derek respected that without deciding to. “Hi,” Jonah said. His voice was lower than Derek expected and unsteady at the edges. “I told her not to do it this way. For whatever that’s worth. It probably isn’t worth anything to you.”
“It’s worth something,” Derek said. He heard himself sound like a man at a parent-teacher conference and could not fix it in time. “We’re not flying. Not this morning.”
Jonah nodded as if he had already spent the price of the ticket in his head and found it acceptable. He looked at Mason, and the look changed. It got careful. It got young. “Hey. You don’t have to say anything. Last time was a mess. That was on me.”
Mason stared at him from under the tan jacket’s collar, which he had turned up for no weather-related reason. “Are you my brother?”