Page 50 of Brother in Law with Benefits

***

Sophie's already home when I get back to the apartment, still in scrubs, the succulent catching the last of the evening light on the sill. She takes one look at my face and sets down whatever she's holding.

"What happened?"

"Chris called."

She sucks in a breath. "He knows."

"Aunt Carol told him." I drop my keys on the counter, harder than I mean to. "I should've called him myself.Weeks ago. I kept telling myself there wasn't a good time, and there wasn't, but that's not actually an excuse, that's just — cowardice."

"What did he say?"

I tell her. All of it: the anger, the old wound about being the kid brother, the specific, ugly accusation that I took the whole set, Mom and the job and her too, like Sophie's a line item on an inventory instead of a person who made her own choices. I watch her face while I say it, watch her absorb the version of herself Chris just described, and I hate that I'm the one who has to hand it to her.

"He's thinking about coming," I say finally.

Sophie's quiet for a long moment, arms wrapped around herself, standing in the kitchen we've built together over three weeks of shared groceries and a plant that's finally thriving.

"Good," she says, and her voice is steady, sure. "Let him come. I'm tired of being something people find out about secondhand."

She looks like she's bracing for something, the same way she braced on a porch five months ago for a man she wasn't sure was going to stay.

I cross the kitchen and pull her in, and she lets me, and for a minute neither of us says anything else, because there isn't anything else to say yet — not until Chris decides whether he's actually getting on a plane, not until we find out exactly howmuch of this town's good opinion of us survives him landing in it.

16

Sophie

Chris doesn't call first.

I find that out the hard way, on a Thursday that starts completely ordinary — a full waiting room, a toddler with an ear infection, a seven-year-old who needs stitches and handles it better than most adults I've treated — and turns into something else entirely, when Diane from the front desk pokes her head into the supply room where I'm restocking gauze.

"Sophie. There's someone here asking for you. Says he's family."

Something in her tone makes me look up. Diane's not usually careful with her words.

"Who?"

"Well," She hesitates, glancing back toward the waiting room. She knows exactly who he is, it’s Copper Falls, after all. But she’s acting weird. "He used to be your husband."

The gauze roll slips out of my hand.

I find him standing near the front desk in a jacket that's too nice for Copper Falls, hands in his pockets, looking exactly like Grant and nothing like him at all — same jaw, same dark hair, but younger, softer around the edges in a way that used to read as boyish and now, five years and one confrontation phone call later, just reads as unfinished.

Chris always looked like a man who hadn't decided who he was going to be yet. Standing in my clinic's waiting room, he still does.

"Chris."

"Sophie." His eyes move over me, taking in the scrubs, ponytail, the badge clipped to my pocket that says my last name is still, legally,Guilligan; a detail I've never gotten around to changing and am suddenly, acutely aware of. "You look good."

"What are you doing here?"

"Can we talk? Somewhere private."

Every instinct I have says no. But the waiting room has six sets of eyes in it, and Diane is watching us with the particular stillness of someone deciding whether this qualifies as an emergency, and I am not doing this in front of a toddler with an ear infection.

"Ten minutes," I say. "I have patients."