Page 19 of Brother in Law with Benefits

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Just a little longer." His mouth finds my temple, presses there, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world after all.

So we stay. We don't talk about what comes next or what this is or how we're going to navigate three months of this.

6

Grant

The house smells like ginger tea and illness and something underneath both that I'm starting to associate with bad days.

Today was a bad day.

Mom got through the infusion fine — better than the last one, actually, according to the nurse's log I've been keeping since week two. But the drive home undid her. Something about the motion. She made it inside and straight to the bathroom, and by six PM she'd thrown up three times and was curled in her recliner with her eyes closed, grey around the mouth.

I don't know why I called Sophie instead of the after-hours nurse line. I have the number. I had it memorized. I called Sophie anyway.

She was there in an instant.

She didn't make a thing of it. Just came in with a bag, changed into the soft clothes she'd apparently packed, and took over. Icechips. The exact right amount of pressure on Mom's back. The specific words that helped: "You're doing great, Patty, you're almost through the worst of it" and the ones that didn't. She knew which was which.

I stood in the doorway of the living room and watched a woman who had divorced into this family take care of it better than I know how to. There's a particular kind of humbling in that — nineteen years of managing crews and crises across half a dozen countries, and I still felt like a spare part in my own mother's living room, handing Sophie things before she asked for them because it was the only role available to me.

Now it's eleven, and Mom is finally asleep in her bed. Sophie is sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea that's probably gone cold, her feet curled up under her on the chair. She's wearing leggings and an oversized sweatshirt that saysCOPPER FALLS CHILDREN'S CLINIC FUN RUNon the front in faded letters. She looks exhausted. She looks exactly right in my mother's kitchen.

"Thank you," I say. "For coming."

"Of course."

"You worked a shift today, sorry for bothering you."

"I'm used to it." She wraps her hands around the warm mug. Her eyes are soft from tiredness. "She's going to wake up feeling better. The worst-day pattern always breaks by morning."

She almost smiles. "I'm a nurse. I track everything."

I've been thinking about something for three days. Turning it over at odd hours, when I was mowing the lawn, lying awake at four AM still on some other continent's clock, standing in the shower letting the water run cold because I'd stopped paying attention to it. It's a small question. It shouldn't carry the weight it carries.

I know I shouldn't ask. Know that asking it opens a door I told myself I was keeping closed. Three months. Then I’m gone.That was the arrangement — not with her, just with myself. My internal contract, drawn up somewhere over the Atlantic before I'd even landed, back when I still believed I had the discipline to hold to it.

I ask anyway.

"At the wedding." I keep my voice level, the same voice I use to brief project timelines. Matter-of-fact. "When we danced. Did you feel it?"

The air gets heavy.

Sophie looks up from her mug.

"Yes," she says.

One word. No hesitation.

Just yes.

I absorb that. The wedding was five years ago. We'd known each other for forty-eight hours. She was twenty-three and about to leave the reception with her brand-new husband and she had felt it and she's been carrying that just like I have. It’s been five years of experiencing something neither of us had permission to name, sitting quietly under two entirely separate lives until a cancer diagnosis put us back in the same kitchen.

"I left because of it," I say.

"I know." She holds my eyes. "I figured that out about six months later."