Page 107 of Crosswind

He looks at the ceiling. "Use it exactly as I said it."

I post it that evening. It becomes the most liked comment on the video within two hours.

The next morning Jan comes to breakfast, sits down, and says without looking up from his coffee: "We'll discuss the airports video."

Which, from Jan, means yes.

— — —

Peter arrives on a Friday evening in November.

My brother lives in Bergen — Norway, not New Jersey, as Lucia established, and we see each other three or four times a year. He knows about Jan from months of phone calls and texts, from Brno, from the way I talk about things when Jan is in the same sentence. He knows, I think, most of it. But knowing about someone and being in the same room as them are different things.

Jan comes to the airport with me to pick Peter up. This was Jan's decision, not mine… he said, simply, that it seemed easier to come along rather than wait at the apartment and meet Peter in sequence when we got back.

I watch Jan and Peter shake hands outside arrivals.

Peter is slightly taller than me, which makes him taller than Jan, and he moves through the world with low-key certainty. He looks at Jan the way he looks at things: carefully, without performing the looking. Jan looks at Peter the way Jan looks at most new people: precisely, assessing, giving nothing away yet.

Two people who have been hearing about each other for months, finally in the same space.

"So," Peter says. In Dutch. "You're the one who turned my brother gay."

Jan looks at him. A beat. "I don't think that's how it works."

"No," Peter says. "Probably not." A pause. Then the grin, the version I recognise, the one that is more Patrick than Patrick knows. "I'm Peter. It's genuinely good to meet you. He hasn't shut up about you for months."

Jan looks at me.

"That's an exaggeration," I say.

"It really isn't," Peter says. He picks up his bag. "Come on, let's get out of this airport."

In the taxi Jan and Peter discover, within approximately eight minutes, that they have overlapping opinions about something Norwegian and regulatory that I cannot follow and stop trying to follow. By the time we reach the apartment Peter has his phone out showing Jan a graph.

I pay the taxi driver and carry Peter's bag upstairs and they don't notice.

That Friday evening, after the taxi, the bags, and the apartment door, Jan makes dinner while Peter and I sit at the kitchen table and fall back into the rhythm of brothers — easy, overlapping, the conversation that picks up where it left off regardless of how long the gap. Peter asks about the channel, about flying, about Brno. He asks about Jan with the curiosity of someone who has been assembling a picture from months of phone calls and is now checking it against the original.

"He's quieter than I expected," Peter says. Low, while Jan is at the stove.

"He's not quiet," I say. "He's precise. There's a difference."

Peter watches Jan for a moment. The focused way he moves in a kitchen: efficient, unhurried, entirely himself. "He seems very… settled,” Peter says. "In himself."

"He is," I say. "He always has been. It's one of the first things I noticed."

"You noticed a lot of things fast," Peter says. Not an accusation. Just an observation.

"Yeah," I say.

Peter looks at me with the look he has — the older brother look, the one that has been watching me my whole life. "You're different," he says. "Since him. I noticed it on the phone before I ever met him. You sound…” He pauses. "Lighter. Like something you were carrying got put down."

I look at my glass.

"He does that," I say. "Without trying."

"What does he think of me," Peter says.