Toby hated waiting rooms. It didn’t matter if it was at a doctor’s or lawyer’s office. They were all the same. There were always uncomfortable chairs, bought by people who never sat in them, and paintings that were boring enough to lull visitors to sleep.

Charlie’s waiting room was no different. The chair Toby had been sitting on for ten minutes had a cushion that was at least four inches, which gave the false appearance that it was anything other than a waiting room chair. After a few minutes of sitting on it, that four inches felt like one.

What was the point of having an appointment if whoever you were seeing never seemed to be ready on time? The least they could do is make sure you were comfortable for making you show up just to sit around.

“Would you like something to drink? I imagine Mr. Matthews will only be a few more minutes, but you’ve been waiting for a while. We have coffee, water, juices.”

The woman’s voice got huskier every time she tried to offer Toby something. He’d only glanced over at her a few times, but it was hard to miss that the buttons on her shirt had gone from modest to exposing the tops of her breasts. If they would’ve met a few months before, the dark curls that flowed down to her shoulders and clearly fake purple eyes may have caught his attention. He liked to think he focused on more than appearance, but he wasn’t stupid.

Meredith changed the way he looked at the world. It was more than the way she’d embedded herself in his heart. There was something about her that made looking at the woman flirting with him across the room reveal how shallow he’d been throughout his life.

“You’ve asked me three times in ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I’m pretty sure the answers not going to change. How far behind have his appointments been today?”

“I’d say right around fifteen minutes, but you know how bad I am about telling time.”

With his eyes on the receptionist, Toby didn’t see or hear the door to his brother’s office open. His brooding expression morphed into something almost happy. The edges of his lips curled up to at least attempt a smile.

Anyone who saw the pair of brothers next to each couldn’t miss the similarities. Toby’s muscles were a little larger, which came from years of keeping in game-shape versus years of preparing cases for court. Their sandy hair and dark eyes were identical, so were their square jaws.

“How’s it going, Charlie? I hate to tell you this, but you look like crap.”

It was an exaggeration to some extent, but his brother looked tired. Charlie walked the client leading him into the waiting room to the door. Toby didn’t bother taking note of any characteristics of the guy, since he doubted he’d run into him again.

“It must be like looking in a mirror,” Charlie said as he spun around.

He had a four-month-old at home, who last Toby knew wasn’t sleeping through the night. They hadn’t spoken in over a month, so that could have changed.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, Leslie. If my brother’s looking for legal advice, we may be here all night.”

“He’s your brother?”

Toby felt like smacking his forehead. All the thoughts of that being obvious clearly weren’t seen by the rest of the world. He was attempting to be diplomatic with his thoughts, since he’d announced his name and had been told since he was five that he and Charlie could be twins.

“As you can tell, I got all the good looks in the family.”

Charlie let his smile fall as he turned away from Leslie. As soon as she couldn’t see his face, he rolled his eyes for Toby to see.

“When did you get back?”

Toby followed Charlie as he walked back into his office. Peeking over his shoulder to see Leslie still intently watching him, Toby closed the door before saying anything.

He looked around the familiar office. A fancy mahogany desk was the classiest item in the room. The bookshelves full of whatever tomes Charlie thought made him look good were pretty classy too, but the shelves were run of the mill. The desk had come from his old law firm.

The whole story about his split from his partners was a little murky, but the story of the desk had been shared with a little too much detail. Evidently, Toby’s niece Julia, Charlie’s four-year-old, had been conceived on it. It was a little out of place in Charlie’s more modest furnishings, but most people probably didn’t pay attention to that kind of stuff.

“Just got back. I haven’t even stopped at my place yet.”

Charlie had settled in the black leather chair behind the desk. There were two chairs in front of the desk that looked like they’d be comfier than the waiting room chairs, but Toby opted to stand. He was still trying to figure out exactly how to go about his questions.

“Really? I take it that means you’ve decided to hang up your skates. Have you already told them? Or do you need some advice on things to say to make sure you get the most bang for your buck?”

Papers started piling up on Charlie’s desk as he turned in his chair and grabbed things out of drawers. When he seemed set, he picked up the pile and held in vertically so he could tap it on the desk and make sure everything was straight. It wasn’t as big of a pile as some paperwork Toby had waded through to sign, but it was impressive.

“Everything I say to you is covered under lawyer-client privilege, right?”

Charlie looked up from the paperwork he settled back on the desk. There were questions rolling around in his eyes, not surprisingly. The two of them had never needed to speak under the kind of protection Toby asked about.

“I’m on retainer for you, so yeah. What’s going on?”

“Hmm,” Toby said as almost a laugh. “Nothing that’s going to take signing a bunch of papers. At least I don’t think it will.”

He walked over to the chair in front of the desk on the left and put his hands on the back of it. Squeezing it hard, he asked himself for the hundredth time whether he was doing the right thing. If he ever wanted to marry Meredith, there didn’t seem to be any other options. She’d made it clear that as long as whatever contract she had with Perry was in place, there wouldn’t be a wedding.

“You going to spit it out? I could sit here and guess, but I’d like to get home to my wife and kids sometime tonight.”

Toby sighed and started pacing in the small space. The office had only a single window, which looked out to a brick building next door. If the view would’ve been better, Toby would’ve taken up post watching what was going on outside. Instead, he turned circles in a roughly six-by-six space.

“I know it’s not your area of expertise, but what do you know about marriage contracts?”

His eyes stayed focus on the beige carpet as he spoke. He didn’t need to see his older brother’s face to know the expression on it. There would be a brief moment where Charlie’s eyes widened, and then he’d look down to try to figure out the right answer. The question wasn’t a tough one, but coming from Toby, who never brought up the big M word, it had to be unexpected.

“You need me to work on a prenup for you? What exactly have you been doing up in the mountains?”

Toby shook his head and let his eyes go from the ground up to the ceiling fan above them. He wanted to let the spinning blades hypnotize him, but getting caught up in the motion wouldn’t help.

“Does the name Meredith McLarson mean anything to you?”

“McLarson, as in the McLarson who owns FireHealth? I don’t think I know a Meredith, but everyone knows who owns the giant glass building in the middle of downtown.”

FireHealth. Toby didn’t even like thinking the name. Meredith’s dad owned what was probably the biggest biotech company in the world. Toby liked to think he had a decent-sized bank account, but it didn’t even begin to compute with the billions of dollars Michael McLarson accumulated over the years.

Meredith had never spelled out her last name. It didn’t take more than a simple internet search to verify what it was and to collaborate her story. The pictures of the missing heiress were clearly the woman Toby had fallen in love with.

“That would be the one. Meredith is his daughter.”

“Hasn’t his daughter been missing for a decade or something? I haven’t watched one of the annual programs they do on the case for years, but I’m vaguely remembering they haven’t found her.”

“Yeah, well, I sort of fell in love with her and need to figure out what’s going on with her and Perry Wallace. She says there’s some sort of contract that they’ll get married and have kids. I need to know how legally binding the contract is.”

The room got so quiet that Toby could hear the blades of the ceiling fan circling above his head. When he swore he heard a clock ticking somewhere, Toby had to break the silence, even though it’d only lasted a few seconds.

“Do you think it’s possible to look in to the contract without alerting anyone? It’s really important to Meredith that no one finds out where she is.”

Toby hazarded a glance at his brother to verify he was still breathing. The man was rarely at a loss for words.

“Can we go back to the part where you said you fell in love with someone. Did you and this woman run away to the place you bought upstate?”

The idea took Toby aback. If Toby and Meredith had met in the city, a little getaway would’ve been nice, but their cabins weren’t exactly the getaway he had in mind. Maybe a cruise or some mountain chalet would have been in order, not a pair of cabins running on generators.

“She lives up there, if you want to call it that. She only comes in contact with people if she has to and is pretty much scared of her own shadow.”

If he was speaking to anyone other than Charlie, Toby wouldn’t have described the situation that way. He left off any information about her marriage and the kids. It was bad enough he’d described her as being scared of everything. It was the truth, but not something he was comfortable sharing.

“Okay, okay,” Charlie said as he put his hands up in front of him. “Let’s take a step back. I’m still hung up on this concept of you being in love. You’ve been gone a little over a month, which isn’t much time, especially for a man who’s told me before love is for suckers.”

Toby hadn’t thought that line would ever come back to bite him. He’d felt the pull of his heart when he was too young to know better. That was when he’d said the words, sure they were true.

“Are you sure this woman isn’t playing some kind of con? Maybe she’s pretending to be this missing heiress in hopes of a big payday. I assume you told her who you are.”

While Toby tried to figure out how to explain the whole love is for suckers thing, Charlie continued, changing the conversation over to accusations. They weren’t totally unexpected, but they pissed Toby off.

“If she’s pretending to be someone, I don’t think she’d be hiding. She’d be down here trying to collect the McLarson’s fortune.”

Even before he’d verified her story made sense, Toby had believed her. The story was too insane not to be true. He just hoped that her being basically a kid when all of it went down meant that it wasn’t as bad as she thought.

Charlie was quiet for longer than comfortable. Toby had laid out as much as he planned, so it was up to his brother to decide if he was going to do him a favor. Picking up a pen, Charlie tapped it on his desk.

“I’ll see what I can find out about your girlfriend. With the people involved, I don’t know how easy it’ll be.”

Toby had been afraid of that. The chances of a contract left on display for all to see wasn’t likely. He hoped Charlie had a friend or mentor involved in the legal offices of whoever the McLarsons and Perry used. Even then, chances weren’t great of getting information, but Toby needed something. He couldn’t go back to Meredith without something to ease her fears.

“That’s all I can ask. So, do you have any dinner plans? I’ve been on the road all day and I’m close to gnawing on my own fingers.”

“Hearing that, I’m not sure about bringing you home with me, but I called Sarah when I heard you were coming in, and I’m pretty sure she’s got a feast waiting for us.”

A smile spread across Toby’s face. His sister-in-law’s cooking was quite a few notches above eating his fingers. While Charlie shut things down, Toby continued to ask himself whether he was doing the right thing. He knew his brother wouldn’t send up a beacon for people to find Meredith, but he had to worry whether asking questions would renew old efforts to find her.