Page 53 of Brother in Law with Benefits

"I know."

"I have to go back in there and look normal."

"You don't have to look normal. You have to look like someone who just had a hard conversation with family, which is true, and nobody in that waiting room is going to think less of you for it."

I pull back, wipe my face with the back of my hand, take a breath that shakes less than the last one.

"Go finish your shift," Grant says. "I'll be at Mom's. He's going to show up there eventually, and somebody needs to be with her when he does."

"Okay."

He kisses my forehead, holds it there a second longer than the moment strictly requires, like he's trying to leave something behind.

"For what it's worth," he says, "he's wrong about all of it. But he's not wrong that I'd pick all of this again. Every part of it. Including you."

17

Grant

Istay with Sophie in the courtyard as long as she'll let me, and then I let her go back to work, because she asks me to, and because I know well enough by now not to argue when she's decided to be competent about something as a way of holding herself together.

"I'll be at Mom's," I tell her. "He's going to show up there eventually. Somebody needs to be with her when he does."

"Okay." She wipes her face with the back of her hand, takes a breath that shakes less than the last one. "Text me."

"Every step."

I watch her go back inside and then I get in my truck and drive to Mom's, already dreading the conversation I'm about to have to have twice: once with my mother, and then, later tonight, the real one with Sophie, the one where I find out how deep what Chris said actually cut.

Mom takes the recap better than I expect and worse than I want. I keep it short — I was there, I don't need to relitigate every word, and reliving Chris's exact phrasing a second time feels like handing it more power than it deserves. I give her the shape of it: Chris came to the clinic, said something cruel and specific about Sophie's father, and I got there in time to stop it but not in time to stop it landing.

Mom's face doesn't change much while I talk. That's how I know how angry she actually is. She gets quieter, not louder, the closer she is to fury — a lesson I learned by age nine and never forgot.

"He said that to her?" she asks when I finish.

"Yeah."

"About her father."

"Yeah."

She goes very still, looking at nothing in particular, and when she finally speaks her voice has flattened into the register I've heard exactly twice before in my life — the night her own father died, and the day the oncologist first saidmalignant.

"Well," she says. "I suppose we'll see what he has to say for himself."

Chris's rental pulls into the driveway.

He comes in bracing for a fight he already expects to lose, and something in his face when he sees Mom sitting there — steady, composed, waiting — tells me he'd hoped for softer ground than he's about to get.

"Sit," she says, before he's finished crossing the room.

He sits. I stay standing near the kitchen doorway. She doesn't ask me to leave, and I don't offer.

"I was upset," he starts. "I found out from Aunt Carol that my brother's living with my ex-wife. Forgive me if I didn't handle it gracefully."

"You didn't handle it at all," Mom says. "You went looking for the cruelest thing you could find and said it to a girl who's spent six months sitting beside me in an infusion chair, holding my hand through the worst hours of my life, because she loves this family more than either of my sons has managed on a good week."

I wince from where I’m standing, remembering that I’m far from innocent in this as well.