Page 51 of Brother in Law with Benefits

I take him out the side door, into the small courtyard where the staff eats lunch when the weather's decent — a picnic table, a struggling maple tree, a view of the parking lot. It's private enough. Public enough that I don't feel entirely alone with him, which matters more than I want to admit.

"You could've called," I say.

"Would you have picked up?"

I don't answer, because we both already know it.

Chris leans against the picnic table, arms crossed, and looks at me for a long moment. The silence is long enough that I start counting the seconds, an old habit from a marriage wheresilences like this one usually preceded something I didn't want to hear.

"My brother," he says finally. "Sophie. Myactual-fucking-brother."

"I know how it looks."

"Do you? Because from where I'm standing it looks like the two of you had this whole thing planned out before the ink was even dry on the divorce papers."

"That's not what happened."

"Then tell me what happened. Because Aunt Carol's version has you moving him into your apartment inside of five months, and forgive me if I'm having trouble finding the innocent read on that timeline."

"You left, Chris." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "You moved to Denver. You didn't call your own mother during her cancer treatment. You didn't call me either, not once, not to check how any of it was going, not even as a courtesy to someone you were married to for five years. I don't owe you a report on what happened after you stopped being part of any of it."

"That's not fair."

"Seriously?" I fold my arms, mirroring him without meaning to. "You get to disappear for a year and then show up furious that life kept happening without you in it?"

"I didn't disappear from my own family. I moved for work."

"You moved for work and then didn't come back. Not for your mom's diagnosis. Not for a single appointment. I drove her to every single one, Chris.Every single one, for six months, while you were building whatever life you're building in Denver and calling twice a month to ask how she's doing like that's the same thing as showing up."

Guilt appears in his expression and is quickly masked. "That's not what this is about."

"Then what is it about?"

"It's about the fact that my brother came home and within five months managed to take my ex-wife. Like everything I couldn't hold onto, he just picked up like it was sitting there waiting for someone competent enough to take it."

"I'm not a thing that got picked up." My voice sharpens. "I'm a person who made a choice.Severalchoices, actually, over several months, with a fair amount of agonizing in between them, and none of them had anything to do with taking something away from you."

He pushes off the picnic table, closes some of the distance between us, and there's something in his face now that I don't recognize from the man I was married to — something harder, something that's clearly been rehearsing what he was going to say. "He's forty-three, Sophie. You're twenty-eight. Do the math on that for me, because I genuinely can't figure out what a woman your age sees in a man old enough to—"

"Don't." My voice cracks like a whip, sharper than I expect it to come out. "Don't finish that sentence."

"Why not? It's a fair question. What is it — some kind of father thing? Because your own dad checked out on you in high school and now you're just filling the gap with the nearest available Guilligan?"

The words land exactly where he means them to. I feel my face go hot, feel the wound, old and raw crack open.

"That is a genuinely cruel thing to say to me."

"Maybe it's a genuinely cruel thing that's true."

"Get out."

"Sophie—"

"I said get out." My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my scrub top to stop it, an old trick from nursing school, and it barely works. "You don't get to show up here, uninvited, and tear into my family history because you're angry that Ifinally found someone who actually stays. That's not my failure to explain to you. That's yours to sit with."

"He's my brother."

"And I'm not your wife anymore. I haven't been for over a year. You gave that up. You don't get to keep the veto power on who I love just because you're still mad you didn't want to."