One Favored, One Forgotten

Id been married to Neil for three years without ever asking him for a single favor. The only time I did was this summer, right after my brother Toby graduated high school. I asked Neil to arrange a simple internship for him at his firm.

He didnt look up from his laptop. Tell him to report to the front desk.

Toby took a seventeen-hour overnight bus from our rural hometown, wearing his only crisp white shirt, and sat in the lobby all afternoon. By early evening, a company chat notification popped up: Whos the country bumpkin at the front desk? His collars literally yellowing. Dead.

Someone attached a photo. Neil had his arm slung over another young man, smiling with polished warmth. Same floor, same afternoon. Another message read: Both are little brothers, but the difference is insane.

When Toby came home that night, he pulled out a bag of sun-dried peaches. Ruby, I brought these for Neil. He was just too busy today. Ill catch him next time. He smiled brightly. The girl at the front desk even poured me water. It was really good.

I smiled, ruffled his hair, then turned and called my lawyer. Please draft a divorce agreement for me.

In the living room, Toby was sprawled out on the sofa, scribbling on a sticky note.

When I walked over, he instinctively hid the note behind his back, the tips of his ears turning bright red.

"What are you writing?"

"N-nothing."

I reached out for it. He shrank back but wasn't fast enough. I plucked the crumpled piece of paper from his fingers.

There was only one line written on it.

[ Neil, I left the sun-dried peaches on the table for you. It's a fresh batch from this summer. Mom says they're your favorite. ]

I stared at that sentence, a heavy, suffocating weight pressing down on my chest.

Five years ago, when Neil visited my hometown for the very first time, he really did love them.

That autumn, he drove eleven hours straight just to accompany me back to the farm. Toby had just started middle school. Hearing that his big sister's boyfriend was coming, he ran all the way from the edge of town to the main dirt road to meet us.

When the car door opened, Toby stood there panting, his clothes stained with sweat, clutching a bag of dried peaches in his hands.

Neil crouched down, untied the bag, and ate three slices right then and there.

"These are amazing. Way better than all those imported snacks I buy in the city."

Toby's eyes instantly lit up like stars.

For the rest of that trip, Neil carried that bag of dried peaches everywhere he went.

My mom pulled me aside and whispered nervously. "Neil is just being sweet. A cheap, rural snack like this can't compare to the nice food he eats in the city."

I smiled with absolute certainty back then.

"He isn't just being sweet, Mom. He really likes them."

My mom beamed, and the very next day she laid out two massive trays of peaches to dry in the sun.

Now, that fresh bag of sun-dried peaches was sitting on my coffee table. Toby had brought them all the way from upstate. Through a seventeen-hour bus ride, he had held the bag tightly against his chest, terrified of crushing them.

It was past eleven when the front door finally clicked open.

Neil walked in and casually hung his suit jacket on the rack. As he passed the coffee table, his footsteps paused. He glanced down at the bag of dried peaches.

His nose wrinkled slightly. He absentmindedly shoved the bag toward the edge of the table.

"Is your brother asleep?"

"He's asleep."

He loosened his tie and leaned against the dining table, typing on his phone.

I watched as he opened the company group chat.

[ Set up a lunch reservation for Oliver tomorrow at the steakhouse. Invite the marketing directors so he can get familiar with the team. ]

After sending that, he sent a private message to his executive assistant, Rachel.

[ Your brother did well today. I'll personally take him on a site visit tomorrow to show him the ropes. ]

She replied instantly with a smiley face. [ You're too kind, Mr. Wright. I'll thank him on your behalf. ]

A faint smile touched the corner of Neil's mouth.

By the time he looked back up at me, his expression had smoothed out into his usual calm demeanor.

"Ruby." He spoke as if the thought had just crossed his mind. "HR mentioned a new face at the front desk today. Was that your brother?"

I stared at him.

"You're just finding this out now?"

He froze for a fraction of a second before quickly offering an excuse.

"I was swamped with meetings all day. I couldn't get away. He should be fine hanging out by the reception desk, right?"

"Sophie is a nice girl. She was very welcoming."

I didn't say anything else.

He didn't seem to care either. He picked up a glass of water and headed toward the master bedroom. As he passed the coffee table again, the hem of his slacks brushed the bag of dried peaches, knocking it straight onto the hardwood floor.

He didn't even break his stride.

I picked up the bag, carefully retied the red string at the top, and placed it back on the table.

My phone buzzed.

It was a text from Toby. He probably hadn't had the courage to ask me in person.

[ Ruby, can I go to the office a little earlier tomorrow? ]

[ Sophie said she'd find some work for me to do. I want to get there early so I don't cause any trouble for Neil. ]

The next day at noon, I brought a packed lunch to the corporate building.

Sophie at the front desk offered a polite, slightly tense smile. "Hey Ruby. Mr. Wright is upstairs. Do you want me to let him know you're here?"

"No need, I'm just here to see my brother. Where is Toby?"

Her smile faltered for a second. "Toby is... down in the Basement Level 2 archives. Rachel assigned him there yesterday."

She paused, lowering her voice.

"Ruby, there's no air conditioning down there, and the ventilation is pretty bad. Do you want me to mention it to Mr. Wright? Maybe we can move him somewhere else?"

"I'll go check on him first."

The elevator chimed at B2. The moment the doors opened, the heavy smell of mildew hit me.

At the end of the dimly lit hallway, a heavy steel door was propped open. Old, dusty filing cabinets were stacked almost to the ceiling.

Toby was crouching on the concrete floor. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up past his elbows, and his forehead was dripping with sweat.

When he saw me, his eyes lit up entirely.

"Ruby! What are you doing here? It's not even my lunch break yet."

He flashed a massive, goofy grin, looking exactly like the carefree kid he was back home.

"I brought you lunch. Is it getting too hot down here?"

He took the lunchbox, wiping his dusty hands on his trousers before opening it.

"It's not bad. I've got a fan."

In the corner, a rusted pedestal fan rattled weakly against the wall, its blades coated in a thick layer of gray dust.

"Ruby, I actually really love this job."

"Look, I've already organized three whole shelves. I put custom labels on the front of every single folder so people can find things easier."

I followed his pointing finger.

The labels were written in his neat, careful handwriting. On the corners of a few tags, he had drawn tiny little flowers. It was a habit he had kept since elementary school.

I crouched down and gently pushed a heavy binder back into place for him.

"Take a break after you eat."

"Can't." He shoveled two bites of rice into his mouth and looked up seriously. "Rachel said I need to finish all of this by the end of the week. I can't slack off. I'd embarrass Neil."

I looked at his sweat-drenched eyelashes, a painful lump rising in my throat.

When I took the empty lunchbox and got back into the elevator, the car stopped on the seventeenth floor.

The moment the doors slid open, I had a clear view of the executive dining room across the glass hallway.

Neil sat at the head of the table. Oliver sat directly across from him. Several marketing directors were gathered around them, the atmosphere light and relaxed.

Neil leaned over, picking up a fork to gently correct Oliver's grip on the cutlery.

The gesture was incredibly natural. It carried the patient warmth of an older brother guiding someone younger.

Oliver smiled shyly, and Neil patted him on the shoulder, his eyes full of quiet approval.

The elevator doors slowly slid shut.

At our wedding reception three years ago, I had seen a nearly identical scene.

Toby had been wearing a borrowed suit. The sleeves were a size too long, and his fingers were trembling with nerves.

Neil had taken his hand, gently pressing a pair of chopsticks into his palm.

"Don't be scared, kid. You've got me now."

Toby had looked up at him then, his eyes brimming with tears, but he had smiled so brightly.

"Okay, Neil."

"Yeah. We're family now."

On the seventeenth floor, a table full of laughter and a curated executive lunch.

Down in B2, a floor covered in dust and a rattling, broken fan.

As I walked out of the corporate lobby, I ran straight into Rachel.

She was carrying two iced coffees, her designer heels clicking sharply against the marble floor.

"Ruby, what a surprise. Mr. Wright was just talking about you."

"Oh, by the way, how is your brother settling into the archives? If he needs anything, just let me know."

I forced a tight, empty smile and walked out the door.

Toby came home very late that night.

There was a dark, prominent stain right below the collar of his white dress shirt.

"What happened?"

He looked down, immediately trying to pull his collar up to hide it.

"It's nothing, Ruby."

"Toby."

He stayed quiet. He turned around and walked straight into the kitchen.

The faucet turned on full blast.

I stood in the doorway, watching him scrub frantically at the coffee stain with a bar of soap.

After a long time, he finally spoke, his voice incredibly small. "I was delivering some files upstairs this afternoon, and I ran into Oliver."

"He and Neil had just walked out of the conference room. Oliver was holding a coffee. He said I was in his way."

"I stepped aside, but he still bumped into me. I mean, it probably wasn't on purpose."

By the end of his sentence, he didn't even sound like he believed it himself.

"Did Neil say anything?"

Toby's hands stopped scrubbing. He shook his head, then quickly flashed me a reassuring smile.

"Ruby, I swear it's fine. It'll wash out. I'll just wear a sweater vest over it tomorrow. No one will notice."

It was the only crisp white shirt he owned that didn't have fraying seams.

Right before bed, I opened my phone.

A new photo was circulating in the corporate group chat.

Neil was standing at the head of a conference table, with Oliver standing right beside him.

The caption read:

"Mr. Wright personally mentoring the new blood. Oliver crushed his first presentation today."

Right below it, someone had forwarded a direct quote from Neil.

"Oliver is young, but he has brilliant intuition. I've always viewed him as my own little brother."

I stared at those words until my phone screen went totally black.

Toby finished reorganizing the entire B2 archive in exactly five days.

When he told me, he looked a little nervous.

"Ruby, I want to show Neil the master index I put together. Do you think he'd be happy?"

I gently smoothed down his hair.

"He will be."

At noon the next day, he made sure to wash his face in the lobby restroom.

He stared at himself in the mirror for a long time. He buttoned his collar all the way to the top, unbuttoned it, and finally buttoned it back up again.

Sophie told me all of this later.

When Toby finally made it to the executive floor, the assistant told him the CEO was in a meeting.

He nodded politely. He hugged the heavy stack of master index folders to his chest and stood completely still against the hallway wall.

He waited for two straight hours.

Executives walked by, throwing him weird, judgmental looks. Some whispered to each other.

Sophie went upstairs to try and convince him to wait in the lobby, but he shook his head, gripping the folders tighter.

"I want to hand them to him myself."

The conference room doors finally opened.

Neil and Oliver walked out side by side, deep in conversation.

Toby's eyes lit up. He took a hopeful step forward.

"Neil..."

Neil's gaze swept over him, pausing for less than a second.

"Yeah."

He didn't even break his stride.

Toby's outstretched hand froze in midair. The heavy folders slipped an inch down his chest.

Oliver glanced back over his shoulder.

His eyes landed on the faint, unwashed stain on Toby's collar. He let out a quiet smirk, turned around, and followed Neil down the hall.

Sophie said that when she finally went over to pull Toby away, he stood completely paralyzed for a long time before slowly looking down at the folders in his arms.

Then he whispered, almost to himself, "I guess he really is just too busy."

That stack of master folders was eventually tossed into a storage closet by the janitorial staff.

Neil never saw them.

That night, Neil got home before Toby did.

I set a glass of water down in front of him.

"Toby went up to see you today."

His fingers paused as he unfastened his cufflinks.

"Oh, right. I think I saw him when I was leaving the boardroom. What did he want?"

"He finished organizing the entire archive. He wanted to show you."

Neil leaned back into the plush sofa.

"He should have just handed that off to HR. Tell him next time he needs something, just send a text. Standing around the executive hallway looking lost is a bad look."

"A bad look?"

"We have high-profile clients walking in and out of this office. Him standing outside the boardroom dressed like that..." He stopped himself. "Look, just tell him to wait in the lobby next time."

The living room fell dead silent.

I looked at him, and my mind suddenly flashed back to the hardest year of his startup phase.

Toby had secretly pawned the gold locket our parents had given him. He spent half a month doing grueling manual labor unloading cargo trucks just to scrape together a little extra cash for Neil.

Toby was only thirteen back then. The skin on his hands was so cracked from the freezing cold that they bled whenever they touched water, but he just smiled and said he was happy to help his brother-in-law.

That night, Neil had gotten dead drunk. He held Toby and cried like a child.

He swore that the second he made it big, he would treat Toby like his own flesh and blood.

"Did you forget all of that?"

Neil's expression went blank for a second. He raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"Ruby, things are different now. Can you stop dragging up the past every single time we talk?"

"Given my position now, people are watching my every move. I can't exactly go around introducing a rural farm kid as my brother-in-law to every investor I meet."

"Look, whatever. Is he unhappy with the work? Does he want to transfer departments?"

I stared at him.

"I bought him a ticket home for the day after tomorrow."

Neil frowned. "I thought you said he was staying the whole summer."

"His college semester is starting."

"Doesn't that start in September?"

I didn't answer him.

When I pushed Toby's bedroom door open, he was already packing his duffel bag.

That white dress shirt was folded into a perfect, neat square, buried at the very bottom of his bag.

"Ruby."

He didn't turn around.

"Is it... is it just too inconvenient for Neil to have me around?"

"No. His company is just dealing with a lot right now."

Toby nodded slowly.

After a long pause, he finally spoke, his voice barely a whisper. "Ruby, I know."

He turned around.

He was eighteen years old. That bright, boundless excitement he used to have when he ran two miles just to hand Neil a bag of peaches was completely gone.

"I saw the company group chat. I borrowed Sophie's phone to look something up, and I saw all of it."

"They said I'm a country bumpkin. They said my shirt collar is yellow."

He let out a very soft, fragile laugh.

"They aren't wrong. It is yellow. It won't wash out."

My throat instantly closed up.

But Toby was the one trying to comfort me.

"Ruby, please don't blame Neil. He's running a massive corporation. The fact that he even let me through the front door is more than enough."

He reached into his bag and pressed that white shirt a little deeper into the bottom.

"It's my fault. I'm just not good enough."

Before he left, Toby took a trip to the clearance section of a local department store and bought a silk tie.

His internship stipend was sixteen hundred dollars a month. So far, he had only earned three hundred.

The tie cost a hundred and twenty dollars.

He stood in front of the display counter for a very long time before finally gritting his teeth and buying it.

"Ruby, look at this. Do you think Neil can pull off this color?"

The price tag was still attached. He had protected the cardboard box the entire way home so the corners wouldn't even get slightly bent.

Watching how incredibly careful he was being, my chest physically ached.

"It's gorgeous. He's going to love it."

Toby let out a massive sigh of relief. Then he unzipped a hidden pocket in his backpack and pulled out a thick manila envelope, setting it on the coffee table.

"Ruby, this is for you."

"What is this?"

He rubbed the back of his neck, looking a little embarrassed.

"My internship money, plus all the allowance you've sent me over the years. I never spent any of it. I saved it all up."

"It's not a lot, but consider it a third-anniversary present for you and Neil."

I opened the envelope.

Three thousand, two hundred dollars.

I looked inside. There were only a few crisp hundred-dollar bills. The rest of it was entirely made up of crumpled fives, tens, and twenties.

On the way to the bus station, Toby kept his eyes glued to the window.

"Ruby, the city really is massive."

"If you get accepted here for grad school, you can look at it every single day."

He just smiled and didn't reply.

A moment later, he suddenly asked, "Ruby, do you remember that river right in front of our house?"

"I remember."

"When the water flooded a few years ago, Neil carried me across on his back. The water was up to his thighs, and his pants were completely soaked. I told him to put me down, but he refused."

He looked down, a soft smile touching his lips.

"He told me that when he finally got rich, he was going to build a solid bridge for our town. I honestly thought he was just flexing."

"But he actually wired the money to the town council."

Toby paused, looking back out the window. His voice dropped so low I almost couldn't hear it.

"Ruby, they finished building the bridge this summer. I don't think he even knows."

When we arrived at the transit hub, the terminal was packed.

Toby handed me the tie box. He had slipped a handwritten note inside.

"You should head back, Ruby. I can handle it from here."

"It's a seventeen-hour ride."

"It was seventeen hours getting here, and I survived just fine."

He laughed, showing the slight crook of his canine tooth.

"Plus, I bought instant noodles."

After he passed the ticket gate, he turned around and waved at me. His mouth moved, but the words were drowned out by the noise of the crowd.

But I read his lips perfectly.

"Ruby, tell Neil I said thank you."

The automatic gates slid shut.

I stood completely frozen for a very long time. My phone buzzed in my pocket.

New messages in the corporate group chat.

"Mr. Wright is hosting a massive farewell dinner for Oliver tonight at the Peninsula Hotel. Booked the VIP dining room. Half the executive board is there."

"Damn, going all out for an intern?"

"Wait, didn't Rachel's brother and the CEO's brother-in-law intern at the exact same time? Why is only one getting a send-off?"

"One is a VIP, the other was basically doing charity labor. You really think they're on the same level?"

I stared at those messages, a sudden, bitter laugh escaping my lips.

Same day.

Toby was sitting on a cramped overnight bus for seventeen hours. He had spent half his internship money buying Neil a tie, and his dinner was a cheap cup of instant noodles.

Oliver was sitting in a five-star hotel's private dining room. He was wearing a luxury watch Neil had gifted him, surrounded by executives kissing his feet.

I had seen that watch in a boutique catalog before.

Twelve thousand dollars.

When I got home, I placed the tie box onto the coffee table.

Right next to it sat the bag of sun-dried peaches. It had been sitting there completely untouched since the day Toby arrived.

I walked into the study and pulled out the divorce papers.

As the pen touched the paper, a flood of memories rushed into my mind.

Neil crouching by the dirt road, eating dried peaches. Toby riding on his shoulders, laughing at the top of his lungs. Neil leaning over at our wedding, carefully adjusting Toby's grip on his chopsticks.

But my hand didn't tremble. I signed my name with absolute certainty.

After I signed it, I walked into the bedroom and pulled my suitcase from the closet.

The front door unlocked right as the clock struck midnight.

Neil pushed the door open, the heavy smell of expensive liquor clinging to his suit.

He called out as he kicked off his shoes. "Ruby? Why are the lights..."

His voice cut off instantly.

He saw what was sitting on the coffee table.