The Jacobs estate hadn’t changed the color of its front doors in thirty years, the same deep green Nate had hated as a boy for reasons he’d never bothered explaining to anyone. He stood in his father’s study now the way he’d stood there a dozen times before, hands loose at his sides, waiting for Warren Jacobs to finish saying what he’d summoned him across the city to say.
"A bar." Warren didn’t look up from the papers on his desk. "And now clubs, plural, apparently. That’s the sum total of what you’ve built with the Jacobs name."
"I didn’t build it with the Jacobs name. I built it with my own money."
"Money you could have made ten times over if you’d taken a seat at this company when it was offered." Warren finally looked at him, the particular disappointment he reserved exclusively for his fourth son, the one born on the wrong side of a marriage that had never legally existed. "Instead you spend your nights pouring drinks for drunks and calling it a career."
Nate said nothing. He’d learned decades ago that nothing was the only answer that didn’t hand his father more to work with, and he’d gotten good enough at it that Warren usually ran out of things to say into the silence before Nate ran out of patience holding it.
"Your brothers run divisions. You run a bar." Warren capped his pen with more force than the object required. "I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to prove."
"I’m not trying to prove anything." Nate kept his voice level. "I stopped needing your approval a long time ago. You made sure of that yourself."
Warren’s jaw worked once, the closest he ever came to reacting to anything Nate said directly. "That’s an old grievance."
"An accounting, not a grievance." Nate turned toward the door, done with whatever this meeting had actually been for, since this wasn’t the business conversation Warren had claimed on the phone. "You made your position on my family very clear fifteen years ago. I’ve never needed you to explain it twice."
He left before Warren could answer, because he already knew what fifteen years ago looked like in his father’s memory, and he had no interest in hearing Warren’s version of it out loud.
Nate had been twenty-one the first time he’d come to this house asking for something instead of enduring what was handed to him. Mikaella had been ten, burning with a fever that wouldn’t break, a diagnosis their mother couldn’t afford to chase past the free clinic’s first opinion. Nate had driven straight here in his work clothes, hadn’t bothered changing, and asked his father for enough money to get her seen by someone who actually knew what was wrong with her.
Warren hadn’t even come to the door himself. He’d sent word through the housekeeper: the girl wasn’t a Jacobs, had never been a Jacobs, and the family’s resources existed for family, not for whatever her mother had produced with a man who wasn’t Warren. Nate had stood on the same green-doored porch and understood, with a clarity that never fully left him afterward, that his own blood didn’t consider his sister worth the cost of a specialist’s appointment.
He’d called Alex that night, not knowing what else to do, six years into knowing him and Arianne both since he was fifteen. Alex hadn’t asked a single question that didn’t matter. He’d made two calls, and by morning Mikaella had a bed at the best pediatric hospital in Montclair and a doctor who actually listened, and Arianne had personally guaranteed the bill without being asked to. Nate had tried to pay it back for three years before Arianne finally told him, flatly, that the conversation was closed and would stay that way.
He’d never forgotten the difference between the two responses. A family that shared his blood had weighed his sister and found her worthless. A woman who owed him nothing had made one phone call and never mentioned it again.
Twenty minutes later, in a different part of the city, Nate sat beside a hospital bed that had become more familiar to him over the last month than his own apartment. Mikaella was propped against the pillows, an IV line taped to the back of one hand, the monitor beside her tracking a pulse that had grown less steady by the week according to every doctor who’d looked at her chart.
"You have your meeting face on," she said, not opening her eyes right away. "The one where you’ve been arguing with someone who wasn’t in the room."
"I don’t have a meeting face."
"You have several. That’s the one from Warren’s study specifically." She finally looked at him, twenty-five years old and thinner than she’d been, her humor intact even where everything else in her body had started failing on a schedule nobody could predict anymore. "Why do you look sad?"
"I’ve just been thinking a lot." It wasn’t a lie, exactly. It just wasn’t the whole answer, and they both knew it.
"You don’t have to keep coming here every day." Mikaella moved against the pillows, wincing at the motion in a way she tried to hide before he caught it. "I know the bar needs you. I know Warren’s probably making things difficult again. I’m sorry I keep being the reason you have to deal with him at all."
"Don’t do that."
"Do what?"
"Apologize for existing near people who make my life difficult. You’re not the reason. He’s the reason. You’ve never been the reason for anything except every good phone call I’ve made in the last fifteen years." Nate took her hand, careful of the IV line, and held it the way he’d held it in a different hospital room a decade and a half earlier, when she’d been too small to understand why the man who shared half her blood wouldn’t come to the door. "You’re the only family I’ve got left that I actually claim. Not the Jacobs. You."
Mikaella’s eyes went bright, and she blinked hard against it, the same stubborn refusal to cry in front of him that she’d had since she was ten years old in a hospital bed half this size. "That’s a lot of pressure to put on one sister."
"You can handle it. You’ve handled worse."
"I don’t know if I can handle a surgery with better odds a twelve-hour flight away than the ones sitting three floors down from me."
"I’m going to find you a surgeon," Nate said. "Wherever they are. Whatever it costs, whoever I have to ask. I’m not losing you to a hospital that gave up on the question before they finished asking it."
"You say that like you have a plan."
"I have the start of one." He didn’t tell her the rest of it yet, the family that had already saved her once without being asked, the debt he’d spent fifteen years trying to repay and had never once considered calling in for himself. That was a conversation for after he’d actually made the call. "You just have to hold on long enough to use it when I find it."
Mikaella squeezed his hand, weaker than she would have a year ago but steady enough that he let himself believe it meant something. "Then I promise to fight. If you promise to actually sleep tonight instead of driving around the city arguing with dead air."
"Deal."
"You’re a terrible liar, by the way. You do have a meeting face."
"I know," Nate said, and for the first time since he’d walked out of his father’s study, something in his chest loosened enough to let him almost smile.