Archive of Our Own ^beta

"John? Wow, fancy seeing you here! It's been years. John?"

At first, Robby didn't realise that the woman was speaking to him. He was focused on triaging the emails that had built up in his work inbox during the ACEP conference—which meant that he was mostly deleting them unread; Gloria would yell at him later if he'd missed anything actually important—and to be fair, his name wasn't John.

But it gradually dawned on him that someone was standing in front of him, expectant. Robby looked up from his tablet to see a woman roughly his age. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and had a hand resting on the handle of a battered blue rolling suitcase that was plastered with various stickers: UNICEF, Médecins Sans Frontières, War Child.

"John?" she said again.

"I'm sorry," Robby said, awkward, shifting in his seat. "I think you must have me confused with someone else."

"Ha, ha, very funny," the woman said. "How've you been? I meant to look you up the last time I was back in Chicago but it didn't—"

Robby shook his head. "Look, I'm very sorry, but my name's not John. You're confusing me with someone else." Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Jack was paying attention—probably assessing to see if he'd need to jump in, or if he could just cheerfully collect fodder to tease Robby with later.

The woman's eyes widened in mock understanding. "Right, you're not John, and my name's not Anna. Got it. Is this your attempt at travelling incognito? Slumming it with the little people on a regularly scheduled service?"

Robby was starting to wonder if he was on one of those hidden camera shows. Did people still make those? If they did, a gate area at Newark Airport during a ground-stop was probably a good place to film one. He flashed the woman—Anna—a brief, tight smile. "Again, I think you're mixing me up with another person. You have a good afternoon." He returned his attention to his tablet and deleted emails about IT training seminars, changes to parking lot regulations, and the importance of regulatory compliance with a show of fierce concentration.

Jack was still looking on quietly, arms folded.

"My god," Anna said, now starting to sound truly angry. "It's been more than 25 years, John, don't you think that at this point we should be past any petty—"

Santos picked her moment, as she always did, and showed up just then with everyone's coffee. "Sorry, the line for the Starbucks was kind of wild." She plucked one of the cups out of the cardboard carry holder and proffered it to Jack. "Here you go, boss, one macchiato, heavy on the caramel syrup, heavy on the whipped cream, you killed my soul to make me order that one—"

Jack dimpled at her.

"—and for you, Robby, one sane person's flat white. Whitaker had to use the restroom but he knows we should be boarding soon."

For some reason, hearing a third party refer to Robby as Robby seemed to get through to Anna in a way that his own denials hadn't. "Oh," she said.

Jack took an obnoxiously loud slurp of his drink and then waved in Robby's direction with his cup. "Not John."

"Who's John?" Santos said.

"I'm sorry," Anna said, staring at Robby with a look of utter confusion on her face. "I... My mistake." She turned her suitcase around and, with one last look over her shoulder at Robby, headed back in the direction of the food court and was soon swallowed up in the crowd.

"Huh," Robby said.

"Well, that was weird," Jack said absently, staring off in the direction that Anna had gone in.

"Seriously, who's John?" Santos said.

It was an odd encounter, but also far from the strangest one Robby had had in the course of work-related activities—no one had pulled a knife, or vomited, or claimed to have been impregnated by aliens, or started playing the bagpipes. His memory of it had started to fade by the time they finally boarded their plane, forty-five minutes late and with the gate agent blandly apologetic about it all.

As they stood in line on the jet bridge, Robby checked in with Santos and Whitaker about the sessions they'd been to—sounded like they'd put in a creditable performance; even burnished PTMC's image as a teaching hospital a bit, so the admin would be pleased—while Jack seemed to zone out a bit. He alternated between feverishly tapping at his phone and then silently scrolling through search results with a furrowed brow. Not like him, but then again Jack had come along to the conference only on sufferance and Robby didn't begrudge him a few minutes of abstraction.

Robby got a good chunk of the way through a comfortingly crappy thriller on the flight itself, talked a bit with Whitaker about a tricky case he'd struggled with last week while they waited for their bags, and lucked out with getting to the airport taxi rank just as a car pulled up. By the time Robby was walking up the steps of his building, he'd entirely forgotten about the strange woman in Newark who thought his name was John.

Jack Abbot, of course, was a different story.

Jack came by Robby's place for breakfast the next morning, brandishing a bag containing two breakfast burritos each roughly the size of Robby's head, a jar of salsa and a bottle of hot sauce.

"I'll drink your coffee," Jack said as he sat at the kitchen table and divvied out the food, "but I draw the line at your condiments."

"Rude," Robby said as he peeled back the foil on his burrito.

"Standards," Jack said.

They'd been having sex for about a year now, and Robby figured they were on the same page about how enjoyable it was—not only because they kept having really good sex but because they still hung out with one another the same as always when they weren't having sex. At some point, Robby thought, he should probably ask Jack if they were formally dating or if Jack wanted to keep this as a no-strings good time, but when had rushing things ever gotten him anywhere?

Robby had just bitten into his burrito when Jack said, "I've got a favour to ask of you, and you're going to think it's a weird one. So I'd appreciate it if you'd humour me and if you don't ask me why I'm asking it until after the whole thing is over."

Robby stared at him, making a point of chewing his mouthful of egg and chorizo slowly, until he eventually said, "Is it illegal?"

Jack scratched thoughtfully at his stubble. "I don't think so. Not on our end, anyway. And you should know that I'm following a kind of hunch here, and it may not pan out, and if it doesn't you'll have full and free permission to laugh at me."

"Okay," Robby said, "Then sure." Jack rarely ever asked him for anything, and judging by the look on his face, he was serious about this, whatever it was. Robby had learned to go with Jack when he was serious about things. Beer choice and football teams, those he was wrong about on a regular basis—but when it came to the serious things, well, Robby trusted Jack's instincts.

"Good," Jack said, liberally lacing his burrito with hot sauce. "What are you doing the weekend of the twelfth?"

What Jack was secretive about, it turned out, was going to Cleveland.

"Cleveland," Robby said flatly as they got onto Parkway North and Jack flipped off a semi driver with exuberant flourish. "You're making a big deal about us going to Cleveland."

"No disrespect to the 216," Jack said. He waved a hand at the glove compartment and said, "I put a thing in there."

Robby had driven enough places with Jack by now to know what he would find in there—a manila folder containing printed copies of the directions and hotel reservations, because Jack was a man who believed in redundancies even when it came to a two-hour trip. But tucked in behind those pages was something else.

It was a print-out from a webpage of a Cleveland-area non-profit. It contained a brief blurb for the organisation's upcoming weekend seminar series, complete with a schedule of workshops, a lunch, more workshops, a keynote, plus the usual boilerplate thanks to the event's generous sponsors. The workshop topics sounded interesting, or at least important, but not exactly the type of thing that was in Robby's wheelhouse—surely Kiara was the better person to have attend a panel on forging better links between emergency departments and community care programs for people living with HIV? Some faint alarm bells also rang at seeing that the keynote speaker shared a name with the event's lone major sponsor, the Joshua Carter Center of Chicago. Robby sighed. Great. Some kind of blowhard billionaire philanthropist type, no doubt, splashing his cash around on vanity projects and convinced that he'd be able to innovate his way to a better world all by himself.

"Wow," Robby said as he stashed the pages back in the folder. "And there was me thinking that you were whisking me off for some kind of romantic sexy weekend. In Cleveland."

"Oh ye of little faith," Jack said in a sing-song voice.

Jack had timed everything nicely. They reached the hotel mid-afternoon, right as their room became available for check-in, and could unpack, shower, and change clothes in a leisurely way before dinner. For that, they strolled down the block to a hole-in-the-wall Italian place: cosy and candlelit and clichéd in the best kind of way. Robby relished the rare experience of a Friday night not at work. The food was good, though Jack seemed a bit distracted.

Back at the hotel, as they brushed their teeth and got ready for bed, Jack said, "If you want to tap out of this, it's fine. I can go by myself in the morning, this isn't actually something you need to be there for."

"You understand," Robby said as he dried his face, "this just makes me more invested in seeing whatever this is firsthand."

"Yeah, brother," Jack said in a tone that Robby couldn't quite parse. "Yeah, I do."

The seminar was being held in the conference centre of another hotel two blocks over. The space was nicer than the run-of-the-Hilton-Garden-Inn meeting room that Robby had anticipated. Recently redecorated, plush carpeting, a series of tables groaning beneath the weight of the complimentary breakfast buffet. No need to stand in line for an attendee badge, either, just swipe your phone in front of a central reader and boom, there was everything you needed right on your phone. This wasn't being run on a shoestring budget.

"I gave them all your details when I registered us," Jack said as they dutifully joined the steady trickle of people moving down the hallway to Ballroom A for Introductions and Orientation: 8:45-8:55a.m. "You're signed up for the blue session track and you're having the turkey wrap for lunch."

"Gee," Robby said. "You sure know how to treat a boy right."

Just as they reached the ballroom door, they were passed by a petite blonde woman going in the other direction and carrying a large stack of paper under one arm. "Oh, Doctor, so nice to see you again!" she said to Robby, who had absolutely no memory of ever having met this woman before. "If you need a place to change out of that and prep," she went on, waving her free hand at Robby's hoodie, "there's a dressing area backstage. Let Marge know if you need anything!"

She swept onwards and left Robby blinking in confusion.

"Is there something wrong with my hoodie?" he asked Jack out of the corner of his mouth. It had been a birthday gift from Janey one year, back when they were still together, and it was a cashmere blend. Robby had been highly impressed with it. It was very soft.

"You're just fine, babe," Jack said, with a quick pat to Robby's hip. "Wanna be rebels and sit near the back?"

The room filled up in fits and starts—easily 150 people, Robby thought, which wasn't bad for a regional seminar on a fall weekend. At 8:45 precisely, a Latino man with a buzzcut and the posture that screamed ex-military walked onto the stage and began the welcomes.

"... And of course, before I let you head out to your first session of the morning," the man said at 8:54 precisely, "I have to briefly acknowledge the person who was really the driving force in making today's events happen, John Carter of the Carter Centre of Chicago. Dr Carter will be our keynote speaker later on and we'll hear lots more from him then, but he's here now and I'm sure we'd all like to express our gratitude to him. John?"

People clapped dutifully and a man in the front row stood and turned to acknowledge them briefly and sheepishly. It was all absolutely rote, the kind of thing that Robby had experienced dozens of times before, except for the one thing about this instance that was very, very different.

And that was the fact that Dr John Carter of the Carter Centre of Chicago had his face.

The conference centre hallways were empty, with everyone else headed to the first sessions and the staff busy breaking down the breakfast tables, but Robby still dragged Jack into an empty restroom and locked the door so that he could hiss, "What the actual fuck, Jack?" at an appropriate volume without anyone overhearing.

"Look, I said I had a hunch," Jack said. "But there's not exactly a page in the etiquette books about this one. I didn't want to say anything until I was totally sure."

Robby sagged back against the sink, still sparking with the aftershock of seeing John Carter. The beard was more closely cropped than his, the haircut was preppier, the suit was clearly expensive and not off-the-rack, but the resemblance was undeniable. "How?"

"That woman in Newark," Jack said with a shrug. "Got me curious. She didn't seem nuts but she was very convinced she knew you, or someone who looked a lot like you. Not like she was kind of vaguely half-remembering someone she worked with for six months decades ago. She gave us names and a place and a date range, all those stickers on her suitcase told me she was likely in healthcare or nonprofit work—"

"Jesus." Robby scrubbed at his eyes. This was the kind of stuff that happened when you started sleeping with an insatiably curious insomniac who'd never met a puzzle he didn't want to unpick.

"—so I did a couple Google searches and got to wondering if I'd found who she was talking about, but it seems like he likes having his picture taken even less than you do—"

Robby sighed.

"—so the only photo of him I could find online was like, 200 pixels wide and from 2010 and was giving me flashbacks to that faked Bigfoot footage. Plus I've never actually seen you without the beard. It wasn't exactly conclusive."

"And so you figured that you'd just drag me to Cleveland to find out whether or not I actually looked a bit like a guy that some stranger in an airport may or may not have been confusing me with?"

Jack spread his arms wide. "Look, on the basis of what we've seen so far—do you think I was wrong?"

Robby didn't know what to think, or what to do next.

"I don't know why you're looking at me," Jack said. "All I did was get us here."

"Spoken like a true member of the U.S. military," Robby grumbled.

"That is an argument for a whole other time," Jack said, holding up a hand, which Robby knew from personal experience was true.

"But what, do I just... just walk up to the guy and say hey, nice to meet you, quick question, do you know why we look alike?" Robby'd seen his birth certificate and had no reason to doubt it, but tabloid headlines about twins separated at birth were dancing around his head. A secret adoption? A baby snatched from a hospital ward? But while there was nothing that he'd have put past his mother, he'd known and loved his grandmother too well to believe that she'd have kept something like that from him.

"Outside of my area of expertise," Jack said. "I don't think you can leave without saying something to him, though."

Which was fair, but Robby didn't know that he wanted fair just now, not when he was bewildered and had no clue what was going on—and which of course meant that as soon as he unlocked the restroom and walked out, he stepped right into the path of John Carter.

If Robby had to guess, Carter's central nervous system went through the same process of freeze-shut down-reboot as his own had. Seen closer up, the resemblance was just as strong as Robby had first thought—stronger, even—although Carter had less grey in his beard and when he said "Jesus Christ", his voice carried less evidence than Robby's own did of a decades-long struggle with giving up cigarettes.

Robby stared at him.

Carter stared back.

From behind Robby, Jack said, "I get this is awkward and all, but could I maybe step out of the bathroom?"

Robby stood to one side, but didn't look away from Carter. They were even pretty much the same height.

Robby stared at Carter.

Carter stared at Robby.

"Well, I don't know about the rest of you," Jack said, "but I could use a drink."

It was still only nine thirty and there was a whole professional seminar happening a few feet away from them, so that drink couldn't happen right away. Instead, Carter reached into his pants pocket and produced a swipe card. "I'm in 1501. Could you go wait for me there while I talk to some people, clear my schedule? I'll be as quick as I can. And then we should... we should talk."

"Okay," Robby said, because sure, why not? He watched Carter walking away, remembering the summer's day back in '89 when he'd come off his skateboard and landed hard on the concrete and spent the rest of the day feeling like a bell that had been rung.

Room 1501, it turned out, was more than just a regular hotel room—it was the penthouse suite. A wall of windows looked out over the lake, with the sofas in the living room arranged to enjoy the view. There was a separate small dining area and a wet bar; through another doorway, Robby caught a glimpse of a large bed made up with crisp white linens. An enormous vase of fresh flowers stood on one table; a coat and scarf were flung over a side chair; the walls were painted and papered in the kinds of deep, saturated colours that hinted that a very expensive interior designer had been here.

Robby made good money as Chief of the ED, but he didn't make hotel penthouse money.

Jack let out a low whistle, but didn't seem as surprised by this as Robby felt.

"What else aren't you telling me?" Robby asked.

"You want exact figures?" Jack said, folding his arms. "I mean, the Wikipedia page had a net worth estimate on it, sure. But look at where we're standing and the fact that he runs an institution with his family's name on it and I bet you can come up with a ballpark figure all by yourself."

Wikipedia page? Suddenly, Robby's best hoodie was starting to feel a bit inadequate.

It was maybe a half hour before the suite door clicked softly and John Carter let himself in. "Sorry for the delay," he said, "I had to arrange for Sophia to take over for me and then make some quick apologies." He stopped, as if the overwhelming strangeness of all of this had just hit him all over again. He visibly shook himself and then walked over to Robby and held out his hand. "I'm John Carter."

"Michael Robinavitch," Robby said, taking the offered hand and shaking it. Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware of Jack looking back and forth between the two of them like he was at a tennis match. "But everyone calls me Robby."

"Robby?" Carter blanched noticeably before recovering.

"Yes," Robby said carefully, unclear as to what hidden landmine he might have just stepped on. "And this is Jack, my—this is Jack Abbot, he's a work colleague."

"Work colleague?" Carter said.

"We're both doctors at PTMC in Pittsburgh," Jack offered. He was standing in that military rest pose he still defaulted to sometimes. "In the emergency department there. We came for the seminar."

Carter blinked. "ER doctors, sure, of course. Right. Makes sense. Uh. Have a seat?" He gestured at the sofas. Robby and Jack took one; Carter sat opposite them. "I'm not sure how to talk about this, or even what exactly to talk about."

"Going to go out on a limb here," Robby said, "and suggest that we're biologically related in a way that neither of us were previously aware of."

"Right," Carter said. "The question is how?"

"Well, I'm not adopted," Robby said, and took a deep breath before voicing what he'd spent the last half hour or so trying very hard not to think about. "But I never knew my dad. Blank space on my birth cert, and my mom didn't talk about him." His mom hadn't talked about much of anything with him. She'd never been actively hurtful—Robby had seen enough horrors over his years in the Pitt to know that a lot of kids had it far, far worse than he'd ever had—but Naomi Robinavitch's main priority in life hadn't been her only child. All it had ever been was to finally make it to the bottom of the bottle.

"Okay." Carter was looking out past Robby, staring unseeing out through the windows across the rooftop and over towards the lake. After a moment he cleared his throat and said, "This is an awkward question to ask, but... what's your date of birth?"

"April 8, 1971."

Carter closed his eyes and said, softly, "Son of a bitch." He looked back at Robby and said, "How would you feel about taking a Y-STR test? Now? I've got some favours to call in, and I could get it fast tracked."

Robby's eyebrows rose. "You're kidding."

"Well, I know two things," Carter said. "I know I was born in June 1970, and I know that my father didn't find recently postpartum women sexually attractive."

Robby could do that math. "Oh."

Well. Shit.

Carter wasn't kidding about being able to fast track things.

"How the other half lives, huh?" Jack murmured as Carter paced back and forth and made a swift series of phone calls. He apparently had a firm of lawyers on retainer; knew someone on some board at UHCMC; had access to some kind of discreet concierge service that could make sure that all of the fine details were taken care of and the rough edges smoothed away without any further effort on Carter's part.

Robby's phone, meanwhile, buzzed with messages from Dana.

Dana (10:11): FYI facilities got the north restroom unclogged finally
Dana (10:12): But there's water damage and Luis is worried there's some asbestos in the ceiling there
Dana (10:12): That didn't get dealt with in 08
Dana (10:12): Gloria will meet with you first thing Monday about it

Another ding: an incoming calendar request from [email protected]. Robby sighed and sent a thumbs up emoji to Dana and stuck his phone back in his pocket. No need to respond to Gloria. She'd find him anyway—she was as inevitable as death or taxes.

"A tech will be here around lunchtime to take the samples," Carter said when he was finally done. "Just buccal swabs, the usual. They'll have the results to us within 24 hours."

"This a kind of thing you do a lot?" Robby said dryly, before he could stop himself.

Carter stared at him in confusion for a moment before he laughed, short and harsh, and scrubbed a hand through his hair and said, "Actually, kind of amazed this is the first time I've had an experience like this. Dad's definition of marital fidelity, well…"

Jack made a show of looking at his watch and said, "You know, I still think there's time for me to make it to the second session, there was a presentation there that looked interesting. You guys don't mind if I duck out?"

Robby did, actually, but what could he say? No, Jack, please don't leave me alone with someone who is, DNA test results pending, a half sibling whose existence I didn't suspect when I woke up this morning?

"Let me know when you're ready, okay?" Jack said to Robby. He clapped him carefully on the shoulder—plausible deniability all the way—said, "Nice to meet you," to Carter, and let the door close softly behind him.

"I think that was Jack's way of being subtle," Robby said.

"Ah," Carter said.

"I didn't say it was effective," Robby said. "But I guess he thinks we want to talk."

"Yeah, I mean that'd make sense," Carter said.

There was a long moment of silence—but then, at least, it turned out that they could both laugh at themselves.

"I'll go first," Carter said, with a helpless little shrug. "I'm John… and you know that already. Um, let's see. I'm a doctor, too. I've been at County General off and on since the mid-90s."

"What speciality?"

"Emergency medicine," Carter said dryly.

"Huh," Robby said. "Runs in the family?"

"My grandmother would have been really pissed to hear you say that." Carter paused and made a face. "But I guess she was your grandmother too, huh? Probably."

"Yeah," Robby said. He still wanted to go through with the DNA test, to get the paper proof of their relationship laid out in terms of statistics and likelihoods, but that was just dotting the I's on everything he'd already seen for himself—not just how alike they looked, but also how Carter sat, how he held himself, even some of the cadences in how they spoke.

Carter. Robby was thinking of him as Carter, but if they shared a father, wasn't that who Robby was too? Or could be? And if he was properly a Carter, then was he really a—No. Better just to think of Carter as John, Robby told himself firmly. Set all the rest to one side for now.

"My grandma—dad's mom—basically kind of raised me," John went on. "She was a tough old broad, which is the kind of expression she'd have scolded me for using but secretly been delighted by. Grandfather, of course, never really got on board with the modern nonsense of having emotions at all. Most uninhibited thing he ever did was die."

Robby raised a questioning eyebrow.

"His version of relaxing was taking the ride-on lawnmower out for a spin. Often after a glass of Lagavulin. Massive MI one day, drove the thing into a stone bird bath, that was it."

Robby raised his other eyebrow. "Wow."

John fiddled with the heavy silver signet ring on his pinky finger. "Dad was their eldest and he was... uh, he was an imperfect guy. You've already guessed that. Died a while back. Aneurysm."

"Oh." Well, that answered all of Robby's anxious, half-formed questions about what meeting your father for the first time involved when you were pushing 55. He cleared his throat. "I'm sorry for your loss."

"It was a few years ago." John shrugged. "What about you? I know you said no dad, but—"

"My mom died in '98," Robby said. More than a quarter of a century ago. In fact, he was startled to realise, he'd now lived as long without her as he had with her. "Cirrhosis. But I was mostly raised by my grandma too, anyway."

Grandmother anecdotes felt like safer ground to be on for the moment—a place to take a breather—and they stayed there until a discreet knock on the door announced the arrival of the tech for the DNA test. If the tech experienced any kind of surprise at being asked to take swabs from two very similar-looking men in a hotel penthouse on a weekend morning, they didn't show it. They were quick and professional, and confirmed that the results would be emailed to them the following day before leaving as quietly as they'd arrived.

After that, John said that he'd like some lunch, how about Robby? Robby said sure, thinking they'd go downstairs for whatever weekend-seminar-quality turkey wrap was waiting for him, and not prepared for how John picked up the phone and ordered room service. It wasn't that Robby had never had room service. He'd just never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of paying a premium for a meal you could get for less just by putting on a pair of pants and walking downstairs. John, however, ordered with the ease of someone who never really had to scrutinise a credit card statement, let alone count pennies. Within a half hour, the dining table was set with the makings of a substantial lunch—platters of fruit and sandwiches and vegetables, some salads, dips and hummus and pita bread.

"I figured I'd just get a selection from their lunch menu," John said, sounding a bit sheepish once he saw just how much of the table was now covered with food. "Obviously I don't know what you like or don't, unless you inherited Great Uncle Everett's loathing for olives."

"Olives are fine," Robby said, selecting a sandwich and some carrots and dip. "Lactose, not so much."

"Huh," John said as he popped the tab on a soda. "Didn't think that was a family thing."

"A Carter thing, maybe not. An Ashkenazi thing, yes," Robby said.

"Oh, Robinavitch," John said, as if he were just realising. Robby raised an eyebrow at him, and John went on, "Which is fine, it's great, it's... sorry. Sorry. I'm bad at this. I just... I feel like I'm auditioning unexpectedly for the role of Family Member, only I never got the lines to run first."

"Not a lot of rehearsals in life," Robby said. He took a bite of his sandwich—pretty good—and then decided to rip the bandaid off, because finding out you had a Jewish half-brother was one thing and finding out you had a queer Jewish half-brother was another, and if he was going to be too much, better to know right now. "I'm with Jack," he said, looking down at the sandwich.

"Yes?" John said, in a tone that said he didn't quite get why Robby was bringing up his co-worker.

Robby looked over at him with an expression that he'd often found useful with some of the more recalcitrant med students.

"Oh," John said, drawing out the word, eyes going big in a way that made him look much younger. "With him. Well. My sister Barbara's a lesbian. Pretty much."

"Your sister Barbara is a lesbian pretty much," Robby said carefully.

"She's married to a man, legally," John said, scooping up some hummus on a bit of pita bread. "But it was because it was the late '80s and he's gay too but he's also some kind of minor Belgian royalty, or a baron or something, and they were only going to let him inherit the family estates if he married. And then Barbara had her whole art thing and she didn't want to come back to the States, so she needed a visa and she had money and looked the part in photos, so they did some kind of quick registry office wedding. Mom was pissed about it. Anyway, she's lived in Berlin since.... '95? '96? She has a gallery and she and Jean-Paul and their partners have some kind of adjoining townhouse situation going on, I think. It's very, you know. European."

Robby stared at him.

"Yeah, I suppose a lesbian," John finished up. "Just not on paper."

"So the family is..."

"Oh, yeah, nuts, absolutely, all of us. I mean, I should have been in therapy years before I was," John said, with a cheer that Robby didn't find entirely reassuring.

John checked his watch and said he'd have to head back downstairs in time for the keynote, and Robby was surprised to find just how much time had passed. He followed John back to the conference centre, agreed to meet up with him afterwards, and let him go ahead into the ballroom for the sound check. Then he hunted out Jack where he was sitting in a corner of the main lobby. He was tapping at something on his phone with a look of fierce concentration on his face, but he still seemed to sense Robby's approach.

"I ate your turkey wrap too and I'm not going to apologise for it," Jack said.

"Every man for himself," Robby murmured.

Jack looked up at that, and whatever he saw in Robby's face made his own shift, and he scooted up on the sofa to make room for Robby next to him. Jack wasn't the kind of guy who went in for PDAs, but he reached across and tapped very lightly on the back of Robby's wrist with his fingertips: a fleeting touch that grounded Robby just enough to let his breath come more easily.

"Pretty weird, huh?" Jack asked.

Robby snorted. He tilted his head back and looked up at the ceiling. The architect had clearly belonged to the school of a little crown moulding is good, a lot of crown moulding is great. "You and your hunches."

"Shoot the messenger," Jack said and then, more softly, "I figured if I was onto something, you'd want to know. If I really fucked up here, you can tell me."

"It's very weird," was all Robby said and closed his eyes. "Guess I won't have to worry anymore about my therapist getting bored with what I have to say any time soon."

There was a long moment of silence from Jack before he said, "Yeah, not going to touch that."

The prospect of actually attending John's keynote was unsettling in a way that Robby couldn't put a name to, and he was tired, so he didn't object when Jack herded them back to their hotel room. He didn't even put up too much of a fuss when Jack drew the curtains and suggested that he lie down—Robby hardly ever napped unless he was too sick to deny it, too conscious of shift schedules—although he was certain that he wouldn't sleep.

Robby was therefore startled to find himself coming to two hours later, sweating and disoriented. It felt as if his whole body had been working very hard at dealing with something, flushing it through his system. He looked around to find that Jack was sitting in an armchair in the far corner of the room, a low lamp turned on next to him. "You keeping an eye on me?" he muttered, voice raspy.

Jack hefted up the thick paperback that had been sitting in his lap. "Nah. Just thinking people shouldn't be allowed to write thrillers set on military bases if they've clearly never been on a military base. You good?"

Robby sat up, grunted, then saw the messages on his phone.

John Carter (4:41): Sorry to have to do this but have to get next flight back to Chicago
John Carter (4:41): Urgent business
John Carter (4:42): You'll get the results tomorrow morning by email
John Carter (4:44): It'd be great if we could stay in touch

And what, exactly, could Robby say in response to that?

Both of them were awake early the next morning and Robby didn't see any point in hanging around. Robby showered hastily and swallowed his meds, they grabbed some coffees and an egg sandwich each, and then they were on the road by six thirty. They still weren't much past Youngstown when Robby's phone screen lit up with a push notification.

An email from Buckeye BioLabs.

"You want me to pull over while you read it?" Jack asked.

Robby took a deep breath. "No, I'm good," he said, and he opened the email and then the attached report. He skimmed down to the bottom of the pdf.

Combined Sibling Index: 7,869
Probability of Half-Siblingship: 99.97%

It was a strange thing to confirm about yourself as you passed over the state line. He wasn't Mike Robinovitch, only child, the one whose cheeks had been patted by the older women at shul while they murmured but isn't it a shame about the mother. He was Michael Carter, maybe, if he wanted to be, with one brother in Chicago and a sister who lived in Europe; that seemed like a different person entirely to plain old Robby.

"Well," Robby said, in as light a tone as he could manage, "seems like those hunches of yours have pretty strong predictive accuracy."

"Huh," Jack said, matching him for careful lightness. He shot a glance Robby's way. "And how are we feeling about that?"

"I have a brother," Robby said. It was the first time he'd said that aloud. A brother who'd maybe panicked and fled at the first opportunity, but a brother nonetheless. He didn't have words for the feeling, but it made him think of when he'd first realised that he noticed other guys more than a nice Jewish boy was supposed to, or when he'd sat in the back of that ambulance and realised what Heather was trying to tell him. Moments where nothing about him had actually changed, but the world around him had shifted a bit on its axis just the same.

By the time Jack pulled up in front of Robby's building, Robby had several unread messages from John and a raging case of the fidgets.

"You sure you don't want me to come up with you?" Jack said as Robby got his bag out of the trunk. "I don't have anywhere else to be today."

"No, I'm good," Robby said, but he let Jack hug him before he turned to get back into the car, relished the brief kiss that Jack pressed to his cheek. He stood on the stoop to watch Jack's car vanish at the far end of the block before letting himself into his building and heading up to his condo. It felt airless and like he'd been away from it for far longer than a couple of days.

Robby flung the windows open, got some coffee going, and then instead of getting a start on his laundry backlog or anything else that he could have been usefully doing with his Sunday morning, he went into his bedroom and retrieved a cardboard box from a shelf in his wardrobe. Coffee made, he took a photo album from the box and sat down at his dining table.

The album was a cheap one but had been lovingly filled up by his Bubbe over the years. Robby turned the fragile pages with care. Hardly anything from his first year or so, of course, but then a steady stream of them: his first day at elementary school; him in a series of homemade Purim costumes held together with duct tape and safety pins; some overexposed snaps of his young, skinny self at the municipal pool at the height of summer. Every photo was carefully captioned in her old-fashioned copperplate handwriting, the letters getting a little larger as the years went by and her eyesight worsened. Middle school and high school; Bar Mitzvah, track meets, science fair, prom; him beaming and holding up the envelope with the offer from his first-choice school.

And in almost every photo, it was just him. Occasionally a couple of distant cousins from New Jersey he hadn't seen in decades, or some kids from the neighbourhood he'd hung around with. Sometimes Bubbe was there too, if she'd found someone to coerce into figuring out her ancient Kodamatic and taking a picture of them together.

There were also three from that disastrous year when he'd turned ten and his mother had insisted that she was better now and Mikey would be living with her, he was her child. Robby had no idea why his grandmother had kept them—he looked desperately sad in all of them, and his mother worse.

Now his mother was gone, his grandmother was gone, and who was there other than Robby to care about any of these photos?

Robby got to the end of the album, and he sighed, and he took his phone out of his pocket. He scrolled through the messages from John, which weren't what he'd expected.

John Carter (7:57): Just saw the results
John Carter (7:57): Not exactly a surprise but wow!!
John Carter (7:59): I think/hope there's a lot for us to talk about
John Carter (8:01): If that's something you're interested in

He'd assumed that John had left Cleveland because he'd gotten the measure of Robby and decided nah; anticipated some carefully phrased message, composed in consultation with some high-priced lawyers, designed to fend off any challenges to any Carter family wills. Instead, Robby had received, well, something that sounded a lot like a genuine invitation to get to know John—to get to know his brother. It was a surprise, but maybe not in a bad way.

After a gap of several minutes, John had sent an image, a screenshot of a sprawling family tree chart that Robby hadn't a hope in hell of reading without his glasses on.

John Carter (08:17): Thought you might be interested in this, our cousin Elliot put this together a few years ago
John Carter (08:18): Obviously needs to be updated a bit!!!
John Carter (08:18): But it's the Carter side going back to England
John Carter (08:35): If you don't want to talk though that's obviously also cool

Robby thought about it for a long moment. He'd lived a long time without knowing any of this. Plenty of people had siblings they didn't know, or care to know. He didn't think that Jack would judge him if he walked away from this.

Me (10:14): Talking would be good

The reply wasn't long in arriving.

John Carter (10:16): 😊

Robby had just successfully had a conversation with someone who was, very definitely, his brother. Cool.

Later that day, Robby remembered something that Jack had said. He picked up his phone and searched "john carter chicago wikipedia", and clicked on the first link that came up, for "Carter Family Foundation". He saw the figure next to "estimated net worth", felt his eyebrows rise to meet his hairline, and backbuttoned so hard that he was surprised the phone screen didn't break.

Being the Chief of an ED required doing a lot of things that they didn't teach you about in med school. The next two weeks saw Robby overseeing the full renovation of the north restroom (thankfully no asbestos was involved); dealing with some of the ongoing fall-out of one hospital financial controller being caught embezzling thousands of dollars from the fund earmarked for technology upgrades; and trying to sneak a birthday cake for Dana into the break room without Dana figuring it all out before Robby had even managed to order the damn thing.

No prizes for guessing which thing was the most difficult.

But there was still a lot of medicine to be practiced: all the usual sufferings caused by car crashes and ill-advised trampoline purchases, by someone trying to take DIY shortcuts based on YouTube videos and by someone else not looking both ways before they tried to cross the street. Every shift was full. Robby oversaw the med students as they debrided infected wounds and sutured lacerations and scrambled for emesis basins.

He himself dealt with the gym bro who thought that adding heaped spoonfuls of powdered caffeine to his morning kale smoothie would help with his leg day workout, but only succeeded in inducing hypokalemia so severe that they had to continuously push potassium on a central line as well as giving Esmolol to get him out of v-tach.

Any case that lured one of the toxicologists down to the Pitt to have their own personal look-see was one to fill Jack in on at hand-over—or, now, to text John about.

It was actually nice to have someone to talk to about these things who understood the job but who'd never been to the Pitt and didn't know anyone involved. Maybe John felt the same way about him. Every couple of days or so one of them would have a case or a meeting that would spur them to text the other out of exasperation or amusement or both.

And if they had time, that would inevitably turn into a longer exchange that could be about almost anything at all: a game they'd both seen the night before; optimal sandwich construction techniques; the fact that they'd spent their overlapping undergrad years barely seventy miles from one another, though John's time at Penn had been very different from Robby's at Millersville. Robby learned things about John piecemeal: he liked playing pool; had kids, plural, but mentioned them only in passing; was a White Sox fan.

(Which was a relief, actually. It'd be a hell of a thing to find out that you had a surprise brother who was a Phillies fan.)

John was oddly like him in some ways, and confusingly different in others, and Robby figured he maybe owed an apology to Janey for never really understanding why her sisters had been able to push her buttons so effortlessly.

The end of the month brought with it one of those rare moments of scheduling serendipity. Jack and Robby both had two consecutive days off at the same time, and at the weekend no less. To Robby, it felt like a luxury. A luxury to take Jack home with him on Friday night, to have lazy, shuddering sex, and to go to sleep together in the knowledge that they had nothing more pressing on Saturday morning than deciding whether to go out for breakfast or stay in while Jack made omelettes. Robby tried not to get used to luxuries, but he was so very grateful for them while he had them.

They were lounging on the couch the next morning with their post-breakfast coffees when Robby's phone rang. It was John, which first confused Robby and then surprised him when he learned the reason for the call.

"He invited me to come visit," Robby told Jack when he finally hung up. "There's going to be some kind of thing involving his family at the main Chicago public library in a few weeks and he thought I might like to see it. Offered to have me stay a few days as well. Show me around, I guess."

Jack set his mug down on the coffee table. "I take it you're going?"

Robby shrugged, rubbed at his chest with the heel of his hand. He didn't quite have a word for how he felt—some buzzing mix of pleasant surprise and happiness and anxiety. He'd been asked to go to a family event. Sure, he'd been to lots of Malloy family get-togethers when he was still with Janey, and had always been welcomed warmly by them, but when was the last time Robby had been able to say offhandedly that he was going to 'a family event' of his own? Maybe never. "Yeah," he said. "He said he'd send on the dates and details so I could be sure, but I said yes anyway. With the amount of leave I'm still owed, I don't think Gloria's going to kick up a fuss."

But when an email arrived from John a few minutes later, Robby found that it didn't just contain a list of possible dates. Instead, it had an attached pdf that gave a full travel itinerary, including flight confirmations for first-class round-trip tickets from Pittsburgh to Chicago for Robinavitch, Michael and Abbot, John R.

"Uh," Robby said, blinking at his phone. "Holy shit."

Jack peered over Robby's shoulder. "Huh. How'd he get my Known Traveler Number?"

Robby scrolled back to the top of the pdf, which indicated that all the bookings had been carried out by some boutique concierge travel agency. Robby hadn't thought that travel agencies really existed anymore. "I guess these are the kind of people you can pay to find out stuff like that."

"The rich live differently," Jack said, picking his coffee back up. "Send me on the details?"

Robby's thumb hovered over the 'Forward' button. "Yeah, but... you know you don't have to come, right?"

Jack cocked an eyebrow at him. "Do I know that?"

"We're not... you..." Robby felt his jaw work as he tried to figure out how to put all of this into words. "This is a huge ask on your time and just because he assumed that you—you don't owe me anything."

Robby could feel Jack's stare burning into the side of his face. "Because he assumed that I what, Mike?"

"Well, that we're, you know... A couple couple," Robby said, meaningfully.

There was a moment's silence. Then, "You know that your dick was in my mouth like twelve hours ago, right?"

"Yeah, but that's... we're friends," Robby said with a shrug, "we have fun together, but I never wanted to assume that you'd ever, you know..."

"Oh my shitting Christ," Jack said in a weirdly strangled voice.

Robby looked over at him. "What?"

"Do you sincerely think that this whole time we've been in a Friends with Benefits type thing?"

It was Robby's turn to stare. "Have we not?"

Jack squinted at him. "I mean, I was figuring that next month was probably when we'd be ready to have the 'So are you going to move in with me or will I be moving in with you' conversation so no, you asshole. We have not."

Robby thought back over the last year or so. Certain things were suddenly cast in a very different light. He thought about it some more. "Are you in love with me?" he asked, amazed.

"For a very smart man, you're also very stupid," Jack snapped. He sighed and said, more gently, "Yeah."

"Okay," Robby said, and he was aware that he was smiling dopily but that wasn't something he minded too much. "So you're coming to Chicago, then?"

"Robby."

"You're in love with me," Robby said, grinning.

"Yes," Jack said, and rolled his eyes. "I'm going to Chicago with you."

In bed that night, sweaty and sated and wrapped around Jack and toying with a rogue curl at the nape of his neck, Robby said, softly, "I'm in love with you, too."

"Oh," Jack said sleepily, "now he figures it out"—but he burrowed in closer to Robby all the same.

Travelling first class didn't remove all of the bullshit associated with plane travel. For one thing, neither it nor Pre-Check meant that Jack didn't have to go through all the usual rigmarole that the TSA insisted on with amputees. The pimply young agent who'd swabbed his prosthetic whiplashed from brusque dismissal to officious thank you for your service-ness on finding out that Jack was a veteran. That had Jack tight-lipped and prickly all the way to the gate, but he was happy to hold Robby's hand quietly on the flight, and then perked up when they were met at Baggage Claim in O'Hare by a driver with a suit and peaked hat and a British accent.

"If sirs would follow me," he said before leading them out to the waiting car, and Robby didn't know much about cars, but he did know a high-end Mercedes when he saw one.

"Oh, we're being escorted. Like we're fancy," Jack murmured, delighted, as the driver steered them smoothly away from the airport and off through the mid-morning traffic on I-90. "I could get used to this."

"What, you're too good now for me and my bike?" Robby said.

"Too smart for you and that death trap," Jack shot back. "Now and always."

Robby wasn't interested in having that particular argument again, so he settled for sitting back and watching as the city's skyline started to loom up ahead of them. He hadn't spent that much time in Chicago—a friend's wedding back when he was still a resident; a weekend break with a woman he'd briefly dated—and while he'd enjoyed his time here, he didn't have any huge attachment to the place. It was strange now to be here and feel like maybe he should think of it as some kind of homecoming.

The driver took an exit that surprisingly soon led them onto streets that were lined by mature trees and even older townhouses. Jack let out a low whistle when the car finally pulled up. The brownstone that loomed over them was about as big as anything Robby had been expecting, and the interior even nicer. John met them at the door, all smiles, and with an easy hug that made Robby stiffen for a moment before he relaxed into it.

"It's great you could make it," John said, ushering them inside. "You can leave your bags right there, come on through, I figured you'd be hungry. How was the flight?" He led them through a wood-panelled hallway to the kitchen, a big, bright room at the back of the house that, if Robby had to guess, was where all the real living happened. The front of the fridge was covered with photos and drawings and school schedules, and one end of a large scarred wooden table was hidden beneath an assortment of books and magazines and papers. The other end of it was free, though, and was where John encouraged them to sit while he served up bowls of piping hot soup and some crusty bread.

"This is the kids' week to be with their mom," John said when he sat down, "so we'll have peace and quiet for a while, but they'll be back on Friday. You'd better brace yourself. They're really excited to meet you. I've shown them pictures of you but I'm pretty sure Olivia thinks you're some prank I made up."

"You know, I'm not sure I remember all their names," Robby said, figuring that was the most diplomatic way of asking, So exactly how many nieces and/or nephews do I have?

"Oh, well," John said as he tore himself off a piece of bread. "There's Olivia, she's eleven going on thirty. Ben and Evie are the twins, they're eight. And, uh, with my first wife, I had Joshua. He was a stillbirth."

Robby and Jack's eyes met across the table in a moment of shared, mortified panic—shit, Joshua, Robby shouldn't have assumed that the Carter Center's namesake was some long-dead ancestor—but John had already moved the conversation on with a skill that told Robby that he had sadly got quite a bit of experience in dropping in the "I have a dead child" bit of info.

Instead, John started talking about how Evie had set her heart on getting a pet rat, inspired by some experiential learning trip her class had gone on, but that her mother was adamantly opposed to letting any rodent cross the threshold of her house. "And I don't care, but my housekeeper would quit if I let Evie have one here. Pragmatic logic won't cut it."

Robby mopped up the last of his soup with a bit of bread. "Have you tried telling her that rats are a known transmission vector for hantavirus and plague?"

Jack snorted. "When was the last time you talked to an eight-year-old? Kids love gruesome shit like that. That'd just encourage her."

"Ha," John said with a grin, as he started to gather up the now-empty soup bowls. "Evie's going to like you."

After lunch, John showed them to their room—or to be more accurate, their suite. The basement was a self-contained unit with a large bedroom, a bathroom, a little kitchenette, and French doors that opened onto a courtyard out back. A door on the staircase closed it off from the rest of the house.

"We built it as an in-law suite, and then, well..." John grimaced in a way that implied there was a whole lot of story there that he wasn't going to get into. "Anyway, I'll let you guys settle in. I'll be up in the living room."

"I want it known right here and now," Jack said as he unzipped his suitcase, "no false advertising, when I bring you to visit my folks in California, the digs are not going to be like this."

Robby very deliberately didn't react to the when of that sentence, and repressed the smile it provoked. He ducked his head over his carry-on, looking for his phone charger. "You'll have to think of some other reasons to tempt me to go out west."

"Guess so," Jack said, digging out a change of clothes before whistling aloud once he turned on the light in the bathroom. "Holy shit, have you seen the size of this shower? And it's accessible!"

They took turns showering off the grime of travel, and then went upstairs to find John was on the phone with someone. He held up a finger to them while he finished up his call, which involved him saying variants on, "Yes. Yes. Yes, yes I understand, yes," over and over.

"Sorry," John said when he was finally done, "a friend's son is getting married in a few months and there's been a whole thing with the venue that I apparently just agreed to help resolve."

"That's good of you," Robby said as John rummaged around in the pockets of a jacket that was flung over one chair before producing a set of keys with a low noise of triumph.

"Nah, Reese is a good kid, I'm happy to help," John said, before pulling a very elastic face. "Though not a kid anymore, is he? Christ, he's 28 or 29 now. But his dad was my supervising resident back in the day, and he always, you know, knew how to make good use of me."

"Old habits die hard?" Jack said.

"Something like that," John said. He brandished the keys. "So I was thinking we could go have a look at the old house? It's a half hour drive or so, but by the time we get there everyone who works there should have left for the day and we'll have the place pretty much to ourselves. I can show you around, and then I figured we could grab dinner somewhere?"

"Sounds good," Robby said, and three quarters of an hour later he discovered that "the old house" was a very understated way of referring to an honest-to-God Gilded Age mansion. Even in the slanting evening light, what had once been John's family home and was now the Millicent and John Carter Institute at Northwestern was an impressively large building.

Jack let out a low whistle as they climbed out of John's Jeep Wrangler. "How big is this place?"

"The main house?" John said. "Eighteen thousand square feet, give or take."

"Give or take," Jack said, with a sidelong look at Robby that said there would be teasing about this in his future.

Robby cleared his throat, stuck his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. "Big."

"I put ownership of it into trust a few years ago," John said, digging a card out of his jeans pocket and swiping them into the building. "Way too big for me to live in, and just too much in general. But I knew if I sold it, given the location and land prices here it was more likely a new owner would tear it down rather than preserve it."

"That'd be a shame," Jack said as they walked down a long, dim hallway. "This panelling is beautiful. Real craftsmanship."

"Exactly!" John nodded. "The university uses it now primarily as a conference centre and office space, and as housing for visiting medical research fellows. It takes care of the maintenance, but the family retained some access rights, things like that." He led them around a corner and along another corridor, casually pointing out various rooms as they went—this one had been their grandfather's study, that one had been their grandmother's favourite sitting room in winter.

Robby was glad that Jack was there to be the polite one and carry on a conversation with John, because he felt a bit too overwhelmed to say anything. This didn't feel like any kind of homecoming. It was too big, too alien: a house that had the air of a museum and all the stacked modular seating of a seminar room. He had a flash of memory, of being twelve years old and inexplicably invited to a pool party at Jim Bonino's house and being ashamed that he felt embarrassed by his K-Mart swimming trunks.

"This floor isn't really used anymore, all these little rooms would be a pain to convert," John said, leading them up two flights of stairs. "You can get more of a sense of what the house used to be like up here. These were servants' quarters back in the old days, and then when we were kids these were the bedrooms where they used to pile in the grandkids and the great-nieces and the great-nephews and what have you. But what I wanted to show you was... Third door, I think."

John opened the door and turned on the light. Inside, under a sloping ceiling, there was a single bare metal bed frame which had been covered in stacks of canvases.

"Paintings?" Robby said, hoping his tone was hitting the right kind of questioning.

"Oh, those are just some of Barbara's," John said with a dismissive gesture. "Every Christmas I send her one of those Harry and David's baskets of pears and she sends me a painting. I'd never tell her but I'm not really fond of them so I just store them up here."

Jack wandered over for a look. His eyebrows rose dramatically. "Those are some technicolour vulvas."

"What I wanted to show you was this," John said, pointing Robby over to one corner of the room where someone had once daubed a height chart on the wall in slightly blotchy brown paint. And here and there along its lengths were various names recorded in blurred pencil, together with dates and ages. He hunkered down, and ran a finger along the list—John and Barbara and Chase and Helen—until he paused next to one in particular.

Bobby, age 10, April '78

"This is, um." John cleared his throat. "This is our brother, Bobby. Robert. When you introduced yourself as Robby, I was a bit… Anyway, this is as tall as he ever got. Leukaemia."

Jack quietly left the room.

"Another brother?" The pencil mark was pitifully low down on the wall. Robby swallowed hard.

"Yeah. That's it, though." John stood, scrubbed a hand through his hair and let out a pained little laugh. "I mean, as far as I know. Unless Dad, you know—"

"Yeah," Robby said. Another brother. "You want to tell me about him?"

"I will," John said, voice thick. His gaze hadn't left the list yet. "I will, I promise. But there's just, there's something I want to ask you first. And I'm sorry, I hadn't planned to do it like this, but uh, I guess I really have to know, more than I thought I did." He took a breath. "Bobby was sick for a long time, off and on, before he died. Remission and relapse. When I was a teenager, my mom once told me that... That she wasn't exactly saying she was sorry they'd had me, but that I was conceived to be a bone marrow donor for Bobby and then when I turned out not to be a match, that had been 'very disappointing'."

Robby felt that rock him back on his heels just a bit. "Christ."

"And I was wondering if you remembered ever being tested as a kid?" John looked over at Robby. His eyes were wet.

Robby blinked. "For whether I was a donor? No. Not that I'm aware of." As best as Robby could remember, the first time he'd ever set foot in a hospital, he'd been fourteen and had a fractured wrist from a Little League game gone wrong. His early childhood memories were the same mix of sunlit patches and fuzzy impressions as most people's, but he didn't think that he'd have forgotten the experience of a bone marrow biopsy in the mid '70s.

"Oh." John swiped at his eyes. "I don't know which answer I was hoping for. That maybe I wasn't good enough so Dad wanted a do-over with another son to save Bobby, or that he wasn't willing to try everything for Bobby's sake, even if it meant blowing up his life."

Robby's throat hurt in sympathy. "I'm so sorry that I couldn't help. If I—" If he'd what? He'd been a child. There were no time machines. What was done was done.

"We were children," John said. "I put aside beating myself up about things that happened before I was twelve a long time ago." He paused and then made a clear attempt to shift the conversation. "Of course, that perm I got in junior high, that's still down to me."

Robby barked out a laugh. "You permed your hair?"

"Twice. There was a girl," John said mournfully. "Hey, you want to get out of here and get like, sloppy drunk?"

Robby made a show of considering. "I'm happy to go get something to eat and also have two more drinks than someone our age should on a weekday evening?"

"Sold," John said.

They ended up at a dive bar maybe twenty minutes drive away. How John knew about it, he didn't say, but Robby got the impression that this place had been some kind of local institution for decades. The inside walls of the squat brick building were so densely lined with sports memorabilia that Robby couldn't be entirely sure they weren't load-bearing in some way. Underfoot, the floor was vaguely sticky, and the food menu, such as it was, consisted of two items: bags of some kind of imported Irish potato chip, and suspiciously cheap cheeseburgers.

"Three dollars for a cheeseburger? What presidential administration are we in?" Jack asked before taking his first bite. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. "I can't say this is a good burger, exactly, but it does compel me."

Robby popped a lactaid pill, and between them they ate a lot of burgers and cheese-and-onion crisps, and downed several rounds of the bar's surprisingly good beer. They talked about the topics that people often did in places like this—sports and movies and setting the world to rights—and the kinds of things that physicians tended to talk about in places like this—weirdest object you ever extracted from someone's rectum, and how they tried to convince you that they'd fallen on it in the shower—before moving on to stories from their own pasts.

Jack told the story about the time he and some military buddies of his had been on weekend leave in Seoul. Every time Robby had heard this story, it had been slightly different—sometimes a sheep had been involved, sometimes a goat; sometimes a well, sometimes a very large jar of kimchi—but he didn't think that was on purpose. A lot of soju had been consumed, after all.

Robby, after some prodding from Jack, told the story of how he'd acquired his first tattoo: nineteen and on his first ever trip outside of Pennsylvania and desperate to impress a girl who broke up with him a week later in order to go follow Phish around the country.

"I didn't even know she liked them," Robby said, mournfully, experimenting to see what would happen if you combined some of the potato chips with globs of bright yellow cheese from the burgers. A taste sensation. "She'd never even mentioned them before."

"It sucks when that happens," a tipsily earnest John said. "When people don't tell you things about them that are really important. Like when my parents got divorced, which they did tell me, but then they got remarried and I only found out from their Christmas card that year."

Jack and Robby stared at him.

"Jesus," Jack said, in tones of deep admiration. "You win."

It was near midnight by the time the cab dropped them back at John's place—none of them would have been safe to drive the Jeep at that point—and past it by the time they all went to bed. Regardless, John still had to go on shift at eight. He worked half-time in the ER at County General, keen to maintain his skills even while he was also doing essentially a full-time job running the Carter Center as well.

"Keeps you young, right?" John said with a grin to a sleepy Robby and Jack as he pulled his coat on in the hallway and picked up his travel mug of coffee. "Plenty of stuff in the fridge if you want some breakfast, spare key in the bowl on the kitchen table. I'll call you when I'm done, ok?"

"He is way too chipper for this early in the morning," Jack grumbled, but he didn't object when Robby poked around in the fridge and made them both omelettes from what he found inside it, while the very fancy coffee machine burbled and brewed away.

The omelette must have been acceptable, because Jack also didn't object when Robby said, "Wanna go be a tourist?"

After eating, they showered and dressed and walked the few blocks to the nearest El stop. A creaking, shuddering train brought them into the Loop, and they strolled along Wacker, admiring the river in the sunshine, before turning down Michigan Avenue and heading for the one thing that Jack said he wanted to see in the city: the Bean.

"I don't get it," Jack said, "but do I need to? It's shiny." He took a picture of the two of them reflected in the Bean's shiny surface and sent it to Dana. Her response was swift.

Dana (11:03): Those are the faces of two people who are up to mischief.

"Clear slander," Robby said.

"I know how to deal with her," Jack said, his thumbs tapping away at his screen. "You think I don't pay attention to Shen?"

"Oh god," Robby said, pre-emptively.

"Ha," Jack said, and triumphantly held his phone up to Robby's face.

Jack (11:05): You don't get it Dana
Jack (11:05): It's symbolic
Jack (11:06): We're just 😎 two small beans
Dana (11:06): I swear to God
Jack (11:06): You should ask your kids
Dana (11:06): Jack
Jack (11:07): You know in case you're not up to date on all the lingo of us young folks

"She'll throw you into the Allegheny," Robby said mildly, "and I won't say you didn't deserve it."

They spent a pleasant hour in the Art Institute—Robby wanted to see 'American Gothic', but lingered just as long in front of the Van Goghs—before bailing out when the crowds started to get a bit too much for either of them. Robby needed air, so they got empanadas from a nearby food truck and wandered south through Grant Park as they ate.

"It's a nice city," Jack said, balling up his empty wrapper and tossing it into a trash can with the panache of a basketball player making a free throw.

"It is," Robby agreed.

"You want to talk about anything to do with the nice city?" Jack said, squinting out across to where the lake waters sparkled in the sunlight.

"Maybe," Robby said, which was as close as he could get to yes right now. It didn't seem like it got any easier to adjust to the idea of a previously unknown sibling the more of them you had, or whether that sibling was alive or not. "Not yet." They walked a little further and, seized by the kind of wild impulse to speak that his therapist had been gradually persuading him wasn't the worst thing in the world, Robby went on, "I feel like I should be saying the hoʻoponopono prayer, but I'm not really sure to who."

"Is that feeling of confusion linked to the fact that maybe there were some adults in your lives who did some fucked up things and there's nothing that you as a kid with absolutely no knowledge of a whole bunch of shit could have done differently?"

"Ha," Robby said, his voice cracking a bit.

When Jack reached over and took Robby's hand, Robby held on tight.

Robby and Jack were ready and waiting by the time John got back from work. His shift had run over, he explained, thanks to a city bus running smack into a refrigerated delivery truck full of seafood—"Haddock everywhere, everything reeked"—and then he'd had to go pick up his jeep from the parking lot where he'd left it.

"Give me twenty minutes," John called down the stairs as he took them two at a time. "Be right back."

Robby thought he was being very optimistic, but in almost exactly twenty minutes, John was thumping back down the stairs. He was freshly washed and dressed, in a smart suit and highly polished shoes that made Robby suspect they had very different understandings of what "nice, but not black tie or anything" meant as a dress code.

"Oh, it'll be fine," John said as he locked the front door behind him. "They'll just want me to do the usual tap-dancing monkey for a bit while they cut the ribbon, and this helps the whole routine go over better. Trust me, I've got a lot of these things under my belt."

That seemed to be true. When they got to the library, Robby and Jack hung back and observed the room—and occasionally swiped a canapé from the tray of a passing server—but John moved from group to group with practiced ease. He smiled and shook hands and somehow never seemed to spend more than a couple of minutes with anyone in particular. He worked his way smoothly forward to the front of the space, where a petite, nervous-looking Black woman in a pale-blue suit was waiting. John greeted her warmly, said something that made her laugh, and when he clinked a spoon gently on a glass to gain the room's attention, praised her as the organiser for tonight's wonderful event. She glowed with pleasure.

John gave a deft little speech: thanked people for coming, especially on a weekday night; was sure that those present who remembered his grandparents would agree with him that they would have been very pleased by the honour bestowed on the family through this wonderful exhibition; said that his family was proud to have lived in and served the city of Chicago for more than a century; encouraged those present to support the wonderful public engagement work of the municipal library system; wished everyone a good evening.

"Oh, I see how it is," Jack murmured, tossing another shrimp something or other into his mouth. "You're the brother who gives the heartfelt but fraught inspirational speeches, he's the brother with a line in plausible bullshit."

"Why do I feel like you just insulted both of us?" Robby said, but his heart wasn't quite in it. He'd pulled out his reading glasses and was examining one of the big free-standing exhibition panels which were scattered around the room. They provided context for the objects contained in a whole series of glass cases, and for the framed photos and maps which hung on the wall. The further Robby read, the more his eyebrows rose. The way the curators had interwoven the story of the city with that of the Carter family was well done—old English settler stock who'd moved west from Tennessee with the railroads, the Carters had made a minor fortune as Gilded Age robber barons and then parlayed that into a major fortune during the Depression—but it was also what Robby would politely term pointed.

When John finally joined them, Robby said, "You know this isn't exactly the most positive take on the family's history?"

"Is it not?" John said, in tones so totally innocent that Robby had a strong flashback to being 16 and telling his Bubbe that he absolutely, definitely hadn't sneaked out to the park to smoke cigarettes. "Oh, that's a shame. All the cousins and uncles who vote Republican and already think I'm some kind of Communist for having a job will be sad."

Robby cocked an eyebrow. "How does having a job make you a Communist?"

"That was never exactly clear." John shrugged. "And anyway, I stopped talking to them all around the time Olivia was born and the word "miscegenation" was used because her mom's family is Cuban."

"Holy shit," Jack said softly.

"Lot of things I could say right now," Robby said, feeling any desire he had to meet basically any other branch of the Carter family completely fade away, "but I'm just going to stay quiet."

"Joys of family, right?" John said, and then he and Robby shared a look so seemingly identical in its feelings that both then had to suppress an identical snort.

They spent a dutiful half hour looking at the exhibition. John added the occasional bit of context as they circled the room—which black-and-white photo of a woman with Robby's nose was a great-great-grandmother of theirs, and which sepia image of a man with his forehead was a great-grand-uncle—and Robby had no idea what he made of it all.

When Robby was young, he'd sometimes day-dreamed about who his father was. Maybe one day there'd be a knock on his classroom door and all the other kids would boggle in amazed jealousy as Robby's long-lost dad—who all this time had been a Hollywood movie star or a famous basketball player or an astronaut—showed up to claim him and take him away. That had never happened.

Now, he was being shown all of these people who looked like ancestors but didn't feel like family, and all the time aware that he and John together was attracting some surreptitious double-takes.

"I think," John said as they left the building, "that we've probably set a lot of tongues wagging."

"I'm sorry," Robby said. "If I'm going to be a, to be some kind of—"

"God, no," John said, slapping him on the back. "Stirring the pot every so often is good for the soul."

Dinner was pizza and salad, eaten sitting around John's big kitchen table, and soon enough John and Robby were stifling yawns and were ready for bed. Jack could ordinarily be relied on to stay up into the wee hours, but now he washed up and promptly climbed in next to Robby. Jack performed one of his patented octopus manoeuvres, folding himself around Robby in a way that he sometimes pretended to protest but always deeply appreciated. Jack was always so warm.

"You know," Jack said softly, just as Robby was on the verge of drifting off to sleep. "After tonight, it occurs to me."

"Hrm?"

"You're the secret sitcom baby."

Robby's eyes opened.

"You're the fall sweeps surprise," Jack went on gleefully. "And I'm the unexpected boyfriend."

"Christ," Robby said with a sigh. "Jack. I—"

"You wanna move in with me?" Jack cleared his throat. "Because I was thinking maybe you should move in with me."

Robby sat up enough to be able to see Jack's face in the dim moonlight filtering in through the window. Jack looked back at him, wide-eyed but jaw set.

"Are you just going to leave me hanging here?" Jack said after a moment. "Because if you're going all in on the season cliffhanger thing, I—"

"No, I... You're asking me now?"

"Well, I just... I wanted to," Jack said softly.

"Would you really want me there though? Would, would Maggie have—"

"Maggie would have wanted me to be happy. Not just to rattle around in the house by myself. Plus all the bathrooms in my place are accessible already, and you know what I think of the super in your building—"

"We're not having that argument again," Robby said immediately, and then, "My lease won't be up for another two or three months. That's all."

Jack's smile was a wonderful thing, even in the half-light. "I can wait."

The next morning was quiet. Coffee and toast for breakfast, and then John had to take some calls and catch up on some paperwork for the Carter Center. "Maybe we can swing by there Sunday morning, before we drop you back to the airport? Give you two the lay of the land."

Robby said he'd like that, and then he and Jack took the spare key that John had given them and set out on a stroll around the neighbourhood. The air was crisp but the day was bright and clear, and given the pressures of Robby's usual schedule an aimless ramble with Jack felt pleasantly indulgent. They played "guess the price" on some of the houses they passed that were for sale, and said lots of variants on "no fucking way" when Jack used his phone to look up what the owners were actually asking for. They spotted an honest-to-goodness Cybertruck in the wild, laughed themselves silly at it, and Jack had Robby take a picture of him making a rude gesture at it to send to one of his sisters.

"Just Lisa, though, not the others," Jack said as he stuck his phone back in his pocket. "Would not be appreciated."

A couple of blocks over they found a solid used bookstore, and by mutual silent agreement separated to spend a pleasant half hour or so browsing their respective preferred sections. When they emerged, a few books apiece under their arms, it was almost noon and they headed back to the house.

"I was thinking," John said to Robby over lunch, "maybe you might want to come with me to the cemetery? To see the family plot."

His gaze flickered briefly over to Jack as he spoke, and Jack straight away said, "You guys should do that, but I think I'm going to hang out here, if that's okay? Rest my leg, start into one of the books I got."

"How many biographies of Patton does one guy need?" Robby mock-grumbled.

"The guy who doesn't buy Star Trek tie-in novels is the one allowed to throw the first stone," Jack said.

The mapping app told them it would be a 26-minute drive to the cemetery, but in stop-and-go Friday afternoon traffic, it was closer to 40 minutes by the time John was parking his jeep. Robby was glad that one of them knew which direction to go in, because all of the paths curved through near identical stretches of neatly-mown grass dotted with leafy trees and hundreds upon hundreds of tombstones, some of them very elaborate.

"Those Victorians knew how to build a cemetery, huh?" Robby asked.

"Yeah," John said. "Kind of like the Romans, I guess. Big on empire and assholery and the ars moriendi. We're just over here." He pointed at a large granite tombstone just ahead of them, right by the path. The only inscription it bore was CARTER in large, blocky capitals.

"Succinct," Robby said.

"We're way too old-school Episcopalian to go in for drama on the tombstones," John said, folding his arms. "At the funerals, on the other hand..."

"Do I want to ask?"

"Well, my then-girlfriend's manic, drunken brother showed up uninvited to our grandmother's funeral. He took a leak in public and then fell into her open grave in the middle of the service."

"No," Robby said, "No, I do not want to ask." But after a moment, he cleared his throat and said, "So who exactly is...?"

"Oh, yeah," John said. "Grandfather and Gamma, of course. Dad said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered off the coast of the Bahamas, but my mom overruled him because of course she did. So he's next to them. There's Bobby, who I told you about. Our cousin Chase, he died in his early 30s. Complications from a TBI. And then Great-Uncle Everett. Not really sure why he's here and not across the way with Tilly, but..." He shrugged.

"Huh." Robby stared down at the green sod that neatly covered the remains of six people whom he'd never know. He considered, for a moment, finding a stone or saying tehillim—or at least as much as he could remember of an appropriate passage in his shaky Hebrew—but then he decided no. He didn't know what the word was for what he felt as he stood there, but grief wasn't exactly it.

Instead, he turned to John and said, "HaMakom yenakhem et'khem b'tokh shar avay'lay Tzion v'Yerushalayim."

John blinked at him. "I don't..."

"I'm sorry you had to go through all of this alone," Robby said, and meant it. He felt a twinge of sympathy for the younger John whom he could imagine: standing here at the graveside, alone no matter how many came to pay their respects.

On the walk back to the car, John said, "I spoke to some people at Martin, Hall, and Jacobs the other day." To Robby's questioning look, he said, "The family lawyers. They help with the administration of things to do with the foundation."

"Okay," Robby said, not sure where this was going.

"You're entitled to an equitable share of Dad's personal estate at the very least, and there'd be quite a bit of paperwork involved but you could also petition to be recognised as an heir of the family and an additional beneficiary of the foundation—"

Robby stopped dead in the middle of the path. "You're kidding me, right?"

John shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. "It wouldn't be as much as before the restructuring, of course, but it'd still be a substantial—"

Robby shook his head vehemently. "No. No. Thanks for thinking about me, but no."

"It's not about thinking about you, it's what you have a legal right to. You're a member of this family, same as me."

Robby looked back over his shoulder at the Carter graves, and thought of everything that he'd gleaned from John about the family. "What I am," he said, "is your brother. But I don't think I want any part of the rest of it."

John's brow furrowed. "Are you… you're serious?"

"Yep." Robby shrugged. "I'm not a Carter. If you're okay with me sticking around despite that…"

John looked startled. "Yeah! Yes, of course."

They walked the rest of the way in silence, but just before they got into the jeep, John said, with a rusty half-laugh, "You know, I'm not sure I know what to do with someone knowing about…" He waved a hand around in some indeterminate gesture. "And sticking around anyway."

"Eh," Robby said. "You never met a Robinavitch before."

The house was a lot noisier when they got back to it than it had been when they left. Schoolbags were piled up in the hallway and from the living room came the sound of the TV and some kind of dinging bell.

"Hey guys, I'm back," John called out as he closed the door behind them.

There were answering shouts of "Dad!" and then the double thunks that Robby guessed was the sound of two kids launching themselves off the sofa before pelting out into the hallway.

"Dad, Dad, you'll never guess what Uncle Jack's been showing us, it's so—"

The kids skidded to a stop in front of them. The twins, Robby guessed: Ben in a striped t-shirt and Evie's face haloed by a mass of dark curls. They were looking from Robby to John and back with identical looks of shock on their faces, before Ben burst into tears and the two of them ran upstairs.

"You did tell them about me, right?" Robby said after a moment. "Because—"

"I did! Of course I did!"

"But did you say..." Robby gestured at his face.

"What? I mean, I showed them pictures, but why would I say anything about that? We don't look that alike."

"I think your kid might beg to differ," Robby said, indignant.

"My kid? Your nephew!" John snapped back.

Jack's head appeared around the doorway. "Guys, overjoyed as I am that you're getting to experience your first sibling fight—"

"We're not fighting," Robby and John said at the same time, and then glowered at one another.

"Cool," Jack said. "You maybe want to stop being dinks and come in here?"

Jack, it turned out, had spent the last hour being instructed in the fine art of some board game—Robby didn't recognise it, there were player tokens and multicoloured cards and tiny hand bells, and the board took over most of the coffee table—by Ben and Evie. Or as much as two eight-year-olds could ever do any coherent teaching. "According to the kids, I already owe them $350, cash or Venmo accepted. You raising a couple of card sharps? Or whatever the board game equivalent is."

"Oh, they didn't," John said with a groan.

"It was pretty fu... fudging funny," Jack said, shooting a glance out of the corner of his eye at the girl who was curled up in an armchair on the other side of the room. Olivia, presumably. She had a paperback propped up on her knees but she was clearly focused much more on what was going on around her than she was on the book—but also on pretending that it was the other way around.

"I should go talk to them," John said. He crossed over to where Olivia was sitting and stooped to press a kiss to her forehead. "Hey, noodle. You okay?"

Olivia nodded, and held up her book in mute response. Whatever that signified, John seemed to get it, because he just tweaked one of her curls very gently and headed upstairs.

Jack cocked an eyebrow at Robby in a way that Robby had long since come to realise meant shut up and follow my lead. Doing so generally worked in Robby's favour, so he sat on the sofa next to Jack. Jack explained how the board game worked in what Robby quickly understood was a deliberately confused and confusing way. He leaned into it, asking the most bewildered questions he could think of: "But then who takes the next turn? But what's the difference between the pink counters and the yellow counters again?"

By Robby's count, it took just over three minutes for Olivia to put her book down, and another thirty seconds for her to come and sit on the floor on the opposite side of the coffee table from them. When John came back downstairs, accompanied by slightly less woeful looking twins, Olivia had taken charge of showing Jack and Robby the correct way to do everything. They were busy resetting the game board on her orders, and Robby was admiring the deftness with which Jack was sneaking in questions here and there that ever so gently drew Olivia out of herself. She didn't look much like John, brown eyes aside, but there was something about how she held herself—part shyness, part desire to be seen—that told Robby he was getting a glimpse of what his brother had been like as a kid.

Still. "How is it you're already Uncle Jack and I'm just Robby?" he murmured to Jack as they went to wash up before dinner.

"Skill issue," Jack said, smug.

Dinner was pasta with red sauce of a kind that had clearly been engineered to try to smuggle as many vegetables as possible into a kid's diet without them noticing it. It tasted good, though not good enough to distract the kids from talking loudly over one another. Ben and Evie were in full competition to be the one to get out the story of how a teacher's pants had split in school that day; Olivia talked about how her class had gone on a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry.

This kind of conversation was clearly routine at the Carter dinner table, with John able to ping-pong between the different strands of conversation with practiced ease while also making sure that Ben kept his elbows off the table and that Evie didn't pour herself more juice until she'd eaten some of her pasta. He was being a dad, in other words, and then Robby realised that for the first time in a very long time he was sitting at a full dinner table on Shabbat and almost everyone around it was related to him.

It brought a weird lump to his throat and Robby found himself just concentrating on his meal, and grateful for the way that Jack pressed his foot against Robby's under the table.

Half of John's backyard had been paved with brick and held a grill and a battered set of patio furniture. The other half was covered with asphalt and had a basketball hoop at one end.

"I keep meaning to do something out here. Overhaul it," John said as he tossed the ball over to Robby. "Pretty sure the neighbours think it's dragging down the value of the properties. But I guess I'm attached to this." He nodded at the hoop. "It was in the ambulance bay at County for years, until they overhauled the place a while back."

Robby bounced the ball a couple of times, just to get a feel for the heft of it, and then took his shot. The ball rattled hard against the rim before dropping down through the net. It wasn't long past dawn on Saturday, and so while the rest of the house was asleep, Robby and John—long accustomed to 7am shift starts—were up and antsy for something to do. "OSHA?"

"Yeah," John said, retrieving the ball. "As if a basketball hoop was the weirdest or most dangerous thing that ever happened in that ambulance bay."

Robby was sure he could imagine. "I did my residency at Big Charity in New Orleans back when there were still ash trays in the waiting room. You tell the residents that today—" He broke off to let out a low, appreciative whistle at how neatly John sunk his jump shot and then caught the ball on the rebound.

"They make you feel like you're a million years old?"

Robby bounced the ball, considering his next shot. "I was talking a med student through a procedure last week, mentioned something about an issue back in the day with the paper charts we used to use when we were documenting a peritoneal lavage. She looked at me like I was telling her how I used to take a horse-drawn tram to high school."

John laughed. "You know, maybe you've got to lean into that."

"What, make them think I'm more geriatric than I am?" Robby's attempt at a bank shot rebounded noisily off the back board.

"Mess with them. See how far you can build your legend. Were you in Dallas the day that JFK was shot? Did you really get to go backstage after the very first episode of Saturday Night Live?"

Robby shot him a look. "You know, I'm starting to build a picture of the kind of ED you run."

John shrugged. "Plausible deniability is the physician's friend. You want to go best out of ten?"

By the time Jack poked his head through the French doors an hour or so later, Robby and John had ended their competition at fifteen all, and were sitting snickering over old stories at the patio table with a cup of coffee a piece. "This a private members club or can anyone join in?"

John pushed one of the free chairs back from the table with his foot. "Price of admission is one of your top five wildest work tales."

Jack dropped into the chair next to Robby. "I've got two separate lists. Service or civilian, take your pick."

John cocked his head. "What's the difference?"

"The second one will embarrass this guy a hell of a lot more."

John grinned; Robby groaned.

The twins spent much of the day swinging between fits of shyness around Robby and bouts of incredible curiosity.

Where was he from?

Why did Pittsburgh have an H at the end?

Did he know their dad was a doctor?

Why did he have tattoos?

How many tattoos did he have?

Was Uncle Jack his brother too?

Why did he put mustard on his sandwiches?

Had he ever seen the ocean?

Did he know that they'd once seen a walrus in a zoo?

Did he dye that white streak into his beard on purpose?

Did he know how to play Animal Crossing?

Did he want to play Animal Crossing with them?

The flurry of questions was exhausting and bewildering and oddly sweet, and Robby had no idea what to do with the unexpected ache in his chest when, just before their bedtime, the twins conferred with one another in a whisper and solemnly declared that they had decided that Robby was one of their favourite uncles.

John insisted on driving them back to O'Hare late on Sunday morning, with quick detours first to the Carter Center and then to the old family house to pick up the three paintings of Barbara's that John had given to Jack at his request.

("What the hell are you going to do with those things?" Robby had said. He tried to picture them in any of the rooms of Jack's Craftsman house; his imagination failed him.

"Oh, I'm not going to keep them," Jack had said. "This is me making sure I've got the next few department holiday gift exchanges on lock."

"What?"

"Robby, do you know how many lesbians work with us? Lesbians who'd love a weirdly floral multicolour Georgia O'Keeffe knock-off painted by some kind of European royal who's also your scandalous secret half-sister? I'll be giving them a vulva with a story. Brownie points for days."

Robby had sighed heavily.)

At the airport, they dropped off their luggage and then Jack patted John on the arm, thanked him for his hospitality, and said he was going to go straight through security. "Gotta beat the crowds to make sure I've time to get a tin of that fancy popcorn for Dana and Lena."

"The charge nurses must be appeased," Robby said solemnly. John nodded in agreement.

Jack was soon swallowed up by the snaking line for the security check, and it was just John and Robby, looking awkwardly at one another.

"I'm historically not great at goodbyes," John said.

Robby shrugged, and then said, as casually as he knew how, "Me either. But maybe, you know, if you and the kids pay a visit to Pittsburgh, you might get more practice at them?"

John lit up, as if he hadn't been expecting an invitation in return. "Really?"

"You showed me Chicago, I'd like to get to show you my city." Robby waggled his head back and forth. "Might take me a little while to get enough bed space set up, but yeah. Maybe over the winter holidays?"

"I'll have to run dates by Maria first," John said, "but we can absolutely make it work. The kids would be thrilled."

"Yeah?"

"Are you kidding me?" John said. "You're already their cool Uncle Robby after that stunt with the Lego yesterday. They'll love getting to visit."

They hugged, a tentative thing that soon became more genuine, and then both cleared their throats as they broke apart.

"I'm glad I met my brother," John said with one last pat to Robby's arm. "But I'm also really glad I met you."

The line to get through security was stupidly long—a family had decided for some reason to bring a three-course meal with them in their carry-on bags, complete with gallon-size plastic bags full of gravy and mashed potato—but Robby didn't mind. They had plenty of time to make their flight, and standing there gave him time to think. By the time he'd retrieved his bag and jacket from the conveyor belt and tugged his sneakers back on, he'd made up his mind.

Jack wasn't tough to find. He was standing looking up at the great plastic model of a dinosaur skeleton that towered over the concourse, a giant blue-and-gold tin of popcorn in his hands. The way he looked over and smiled when he saw Robby joining him removed the last of any doubts that Robby might have had.

"What does it mean about a place," Jack said, "that they will soak you for two hundred bucks for some popcorn right next to a highly accurate life-size model of a long-dead reptile?"

"You spent how much on popcorn?" Robby said as they headed off in the direction of their gate.

"It's all in a good cause," Jack said. "Because I'm going to make sure that the nurses know that I shelled out for the premium popcorn for them."

"Dana's just going to tell you you're nuts."

"Yeah, well, this we knew," Jack said amiably.

Robby had planned to wait to say it until they got back to Pittsburgh, but then he thought: why? He was only starting to get to know his brother because too many of the people around them had been bad at saying the things that they should have said. Hell, how much of his own life had been shaped by Robby's unwillingness—inability—to do the same?

So they got to their gate, the area around it still blessedly empty, and Robby waited only until Jack had sat down and tucked his stuff in next to him before he said, "What you asked me before. About moving in with you."

Jack went very still and very watchful. Bracing himself, Robby realised. "Yeah?"

Robby called on every bit of advice his therapist had ever given him about how to regulate his breathing. "I was thinking, I'd be okay with paying the rent on an empty place for a couple months. If—if you'd have me."

Robby couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Jack look so thoroughly poleaxed. "If?"

Robby scratched at the side of his neck. "I mean, I don't want to presume anything—"

"Mike, if we weren't in public, I'd be on my knees right now proving to you just how much you're not presuming." Jack's eyes darted over Robby's face, looking for... something, Robby didn't know what. "You're serious? You mean it? You're not joking, or just saying what you think I want to hear?"

Robby reached over and took one of Jack's hands in his. He thought about how Jack seemed to have a sixth sense for all things to do with Robby—how there was probably no other person in the world who would not only have picked up on the implications of that chance meeting in Newark, but also cared enough about Robby to have followed through on them. He thought about how his whole world had shook the first time Jack had kissed him; the even bigger quake he'd felt the first time he'd kissed Jack back.

He thought about how Jack had given him the gift of a family and a past that he'd never thought he'd have—how his care had been the thing that had helped Robby take that first, biggest step down off that roof—how he'd been matching Robby, beat for beat, for years now. How big a fool Robby would be to turn down the offer of a home, freely given, from a man with one of the biggest hearts that Robby had ever known?

Well, Robby figured, at least as big of an idiot as he'd been that he'd needed this to be the push.

"This doesn't mean I'm going to start watching Niners games with you," Robby said.

"But everything else?" Jack asked.

"Everything else," Robby said.