Max couldn’t sleep that night, which normally would be nothing new but was sort of new given that since he had been sharing a bed with Dani—or her dog—he’d been sleeping like a baby. Tonight, he had too many thoughts zipping through his brain. Around midnight, overwhelmed by them, he sneaked out of his room and went into the bathroom of Dani’s and called his brother. It was not lost on him that last time he’d made a covert phone call from a hotel bathroom, it had been to Dani.

“Remember how you said you didn’t want to hide anymore?” he said when his brother picked up.

“Hello to you, too. No, you didn’t wake me. How’s the honeymoon going?”

Seb was joking, but the time with Dani here—and in Riems—had felt like a honeymoon. Max had been free from the oversight of the wider world and completely wrapped up in Dani. Emotionally, before, but now physically, too. “You said you didn’t want to hide anymore,” Max pressed on. “And I said I’d help you. Which I meant,” he rushed to add.

“Yes. That came out a little melodramatically,” Seb said, “but the sentiment was genuine.”

“So you want to come out. To Mother and Father.”

“To everyone, I suppose. I don’t want to . . . live this way anymore.”

“Good,” Max said, perhaps a tad too urgently.

“Max? Are you all right?”

“I’m in love with Daniela Martinez,” he blurted, “and I don’t know what to do about it.”

There was a slight pause before Seb started laughing.

“I beg your pardon?” He was a sorry specimen, he realized, but he wasn’t sure he deserved mockery.

“I’m sorry,” Seb said. “I’m not laughing at you, or her. She’s amazing. Of course you’re in love with her. It’s the idea of you being in love with anyone. It’s so . . . not you.”

“Well, that’s my point,” Max plowed on. “I don’t think the me everyone knows really is me. Not anymore, anyway.”

“Ah.” Seb had shed all teasing from his tone. “So you don’t want to hide anymore, either. Is that what I’m hearing?”

Yes. That was exactly right. “What do I do, Seb?”

His brother didn’t answer right away. Max wondered if Seb, like him, was thinking about how profoundly the tables were turned with that question. It used to always be Max leading Seb. Clearing the way for him.

“Does she know how you feel?” Seb asked. “Does she feel the same?”

“No on both counts.”

“How do you know she doesn’t return your feelings?”

“Even if she does, she won’t let herself. It’s . . . complicated.”

“Ah. Too bad. You are in need of a wife.”