Page 61 of Brother in Law with Benefits

"Better." A pause. "Not fixed. I don't think there's a version of tonight that fixes it. But better."

"That's allowed too."

She's quiet for a while, tracing the old scar at my ribs with one finger, unhurried, like she's got nowhere else to be, which — tonight, at least — she doesn't.

"Can I tell you something slightly ridiculous?" she says.

"Always."

"I've been thinking, if it's bad news tomorrow I've been thinking about how I'd want to tell her I love her. Like, properly. Not the sign-off kind, the kind we say at the end of a phone call. The real kind. And I realized I don't actually know how to do that without it sounding like a goodbye, and I don't want it to sound like a goodbye, because I don't want her to hear it and think I've already decided something's wrong."

"You don't have to solve that tonight," I say. "But for what it's worth — she already knows. The kind of love that shows up for six months of chemo appointments doesn't need translating. She's heard it in every single one of those appointments, every laminated schedule, every soup you brought when nobody asked you to. Whatever tomorrow says, that part's already been said, a hundred times over, in the only language that's ever actually mattered to her."

Sophie's quiet for a long moment. Then she presses a kiss to my chest, right over the old scar, and settles in closer.

"You're better at this than you think you are," she says. "The talking. Whatever Mom told you about having two versions of yourself — I think you're wrong about which one's the real one."

"Maybe."

"Not maybe. I've heard both. This is a good one."

I don't have an answer for that, so I just hold her, listening to her breathing slow toward sleep, the alarm already set — two of them, in case one fails, which it won't, but she needed the second one anyway, and I understand that now better than I did an hour ago.

"Ten AM," she murmurs, half-asleep already, into my chest.

"Ten," I confirm. "I'll be there. Every part of it."

"I know."

She's asleep within minutes, breathing slow and even, one hand curled loose against my ribs the way it always is, like some part of her keeps watch even unconscious.

I stay awake a while longer, looking at the ceiling, thinking about spice jars in alphabetical order and a woman who has spent her whole life bracing for the people she loves to disappear on her, one way or another — a father to Florida, a mother to distance dressed up as geography, a husband to Denver, and now, maybe, a mother-in-law who was never technically her mother-in-law at all but has been exactly that in every way that's ever counted.

I think about tomorrow. About Dr. Reese's face, the two versions of it Sophie's been running on a loop all day. I don't know which one we're going to get.

But I know I'll be standing next to her either way, and for a man who spent twenty years making sure he never had to find out what that kind of standing-next-to actually costs.

I fall asleep with her hand still curled against my ribs, the alarm set for ten AM, twice, just in case, and I think, right before I go under, that if tomorrow goes the way we're both hoping it does, I'm going to remember exactly this — the alphabetized spice rack, the quiet, the two of us choosing gentle on the one night gentle was the only thing either of us had left to give.

And if it doesn't go that way, I'll remember it too. I'll remember that we had this. Whatever comes, she wasn't alone in the kitchen with the oregano.

She had me. She's always going to have me.

Sophie

Epilogue

October in Copper Falls smells like woodsmoke and the specific, slightly desperate cheer of a town bracing itself for another Illinois winter, and I am standing in the clinic parking lot in my scrubs when Grant pulls up in the truck, still in his Sullivan Construction gear, dust on his forearms from a day spent underground with a water main older than both of us combined.

"You didn't change," I say, climbing in, tossing my bag into the footwell.

"Neither did you."

"I have an excuse. I was working."

"So was I."

"Yes, but your work involves dirt. My work involves other people's children coughing directly into my face. I feel like that should earn me some points."