Page 1 of Brother in Law with Benefits

1

Grant

The Welcome to Copper Falls sign looks exactly the same as it did the day I left. Same peeling paint on the posts. Same bullet holes from teenagers who had too much time and not enough sense. Same lie about this place being "A Great Place to Call Home."

Population 8,247.Probably shed a few hundred since then. These days, small towns in rural Illinois empty out slowly, quietly, inevitably.

I downshift the rental truck as Main Street comes into view. Storefronts I remember and storefronts I don't, layered over each other like the town couldn't decide what decade it wanted to be. The diner's still there. The hardware store's got a new sign. Somebody opened a wine bar where the shoe repair place used to be.

The GPS tries to reroute me through a subdivision that didn't exist when I lived here. I ignore it. I know these streets the wayI know how to field-strip an M4 in the dark — muscle memory that twenty years overseas couldn't touch. Some part of you never leaves the place that raised you, no matter how hard you try.

The houses get smaller as I drive, paint less fresh, yards more practical than pretty. This is the part of Copper Falls where people actually live, not the downtown wine bars trying to convince passing tourists this place has charm.

Mom's house is white paint gone grey. Front porch sagging more than I remember. The flowerbeds Dad used to obsess over have gone to weeds — hostas choked out, the trellis he built for Mom's climbing roses leaning like it's given up waiting for him to fix it.

Dad.

I push that down hard and fast. Three years since the heart attack. Three years since I was too far away, too deep in a contract, too fucking late. I was six hours from a satellite phone that worked and it still took two days to get word, and by the time the Army cleared me to leave the site, the funeral was over and my mother was telling me not to bother coming home for it.

Your father would understand, Grant. Finish the job. That's what he'd want.

I've never decided if that was mercy or a life sentence.

The Army taught me to compartmentalize. Nineteen years of contract work perfected it. You learn to put things in boxes and shut the lid, because a man who can't do that doesn't last long building water systems in places where the ground still has ordnance in it. I got good at the boxes. I got so good at the boxes that I stopped noticing how many of them I was carrying until the plane started its descent into Chicago and every single one of them cracked open at once.

I park on the street. Mom's ancient Buick takes up most of the driveway, and I'm not sure the rental's suspension can handle the potholes anyway.

The front door opens before I reach the porch.

Sophie Guilligan steps out.

Not Mom.Sophie.

My brother's ex-wife.

She's wearing pale blue scrubs with cartoon teddy bears. Her honey blonde hair is up in a ponytail, shadows under her eyes, purse over her shoulder, keys already in her hand. She looks like someone who's been up too long and knows it, and still manages to look like the best thing I've seen in thirty-six hours of connecting flights and airport coffee.

She freezes when she sees me.

I freeze too.

Five years since I saw her walk down that aisle in white. Five years since I danced with her at the reception and spent three minutes trying very hard to think about literally anything else — flow rates, deployment schedules, the exact torque spec on a pipe fitting, anything that wasn't the way she felt fitting against me like she'd been measured for it. Five years since I left the next morning because staying felt like standing at the edge of something I couldn't afford to fall into.

"Grant." Her voice is exactly how I remembered. Warm and slightly raspy.

"Sophie."

We stare at each other. A car passes on Oak. Someone's mowing three houses down. Completely ordinary sounds from a completely ordinary afternoon, and none of it matches what's happening in my chest.

"I didn't know you were coming today," she says. "Patty said this week, but—"

"Flights got moved around." I sound like I'm giving a mission briefing. Clipped. Professional. Locked down. "Came straight from the airport."

"Right. That makes sense." She shifts her purse higher. "I was just leaving. Patty's resting, but she'll be excited to see you."

She moves to step around me. I shift to let her pass. For a second we're close enough that I catch her scent of something clean and simple, soap and vanilla body spray. I catalog it and hate myself a little for noticing it, five minutes back in this town and already doing exactly what I told myself on the flight over I wasn't going to do.

"Sophie." Mom's voice from inside. Sharp. Commanding. The voice that raised two boys and accepted exactly zero nonsense from either of us. "Did Grant's truck pull up or am I hallucinating from the anti-nausea meds?"