Page 52 of Brother in Law with Benefits

Chris opens his mouth — to say something else, something worse, I can feel it coming — when the side door bangs open behind me.

Grant.

Still in his Sullivan gear, dust on his jeans, like he came straight from the site without stopping. Someone must have called him — Diane, probably, doing exactly the kind of quiet, protective thing Diane does — and the look on his face when he sees Chris standing three feet from me is not a look I've seen on him before. Angry. Lethal.

"Chris."

"Grant." Chris straightens, and I watch him try to arrange his face into something composed and fail. "Was just having a conversation with your girlfriend."

"Doesn't look like a conversation from here."

"Ask her what I said, then. See if you still want to defend it."

Grant looks at me and reads whatever's on my face, the flush I can still feel, the way I'm standing with my arms wrapped around myself like I'm holding something in.

"What did you say to her?" It's not a question. His voice has gone very quiet, very even, the same voice I imagine he used on crews in places where the wrong tone got people killed.

"I asked a fair question about the math on your relationship."

"Chris."

"I asked why a twenty-eight-year-old with an absent father is suddenly so interested in a forty-three-year-old man who used to babysit her at family dinners."

The space between them changes. I watch it happen — watch Grant go very still, the way he does right before something breaks, and for one terrible second I think he's actually going to hit his own brother in the courtyard of my clinic while a toddler waits inside for someone to look at his ear.

"You don't get to talk to her like that." Grant's voice is low, controlled, and somehow more frightening for the control in it. "Not about her, not about her family, not ever. I don't care how angry you are at me. She didn't do anything to you."

"She married into this family and then—"

"She showed up for six months when neither of us did." Grant's voice cracks, finally, the control fracturing just slightly. "She drove Mom to every single chemo appointment while I was on the other side of the world and you were in Denver returning her calls twice a month if she was lucky. You want to be angry at somebody, Chris, be angry at me. I'm the one who fell in love with your ex-wife. That's mine to own and I'm not going to apologize for it, not to you, not to anyone. But she has spent five years being the person who showed up when everybody else in this family left, including both of us, and I will not stand here and let you tear her apart for finally getting something good."

Chris's jaw works. For a second I think he's going to keep going. I can see the argument still loaded behind his eyes, but then something in him deflates instead, the anger draining out and leaving something rawer and younger underneath it.

"I lost everything," he says, quieter now. "The town. The family. Her. And you just — walked in and picked all of it back up like it was never mine to begin with."

"You didn't lose it," Grant says. "You left it. There's a difference, and I think you know that, or you wouldn't be this angry."

Chris doesn't have an answer for that. He looks between us — me, still shaking slightly, arms wrapped around myself; Grant,planted like a wall between me and his own brother — and something in his face closes.

"I need to go see Mom," he says finally. "That's actually why I flew out. Not for this."

"She doesn't know you're here yet."

"I'll call her." He starts toward the parking lot, then stops, looks back at me one more time. "I'm sorry. For the father thing. That was… I shouldn't have said that."

It's not a real apology. It's just a platitude offered because Grant is standing there and Chris knows how it looks not to give it. I don't say anything back. I don't have it in me to be gracious yet.

He walks to a rental car and drives off, and the courtyard goes quiet except for the sound of my own breathing, which I'm only now noticing is ragged.

Grant turns to me immediately, hands coming up to my face, tilting it so he can see me properly. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "Is it true? Am I just—" I can't finish it. Can't make myself say the thing Chris handed me, even secondhand, even knowing exactly how deliberately cruel it was designed to be.

"No." Grant's voice is fierce, certain, no room in it for negotiation. "You are not filling a gap your father left. You are not a consolation prize. You are not anything Chris just accused you of being, and I need you to hear that from me clearly, because I watched my brother try to weaponize the worst thing that ever happened to you, and I am furious, and none of it is true."

I lean into him, and he wraps his arms around me right there in the clinic courtyard, and for a minute I just breathe against his chest and let myself be held together by someone who isn't going anywhere.

"I have a patient waiting," I say eventually, muffled against his shirt.