Page 55 of Brother in Law with Benefits

Sophie:We'll see.

Me:Fair. How are you?

The three dots sit there a long time.

Sophie:Not great, if I'm honest.

Me:I'll be home soon.

***

I stay through dinner, navigate careful small talk, and by the time I get home it's nearly nine and Sophie's on the couch in the dark, knees pulled up to her chest, the succulent backlit on the sill behind her.

I cross the room without a word and sit, pulling her against my side.

"Tell me," I say. "Not what he said. What you're doing with it, in your head, right now."

She's quiet for a moment, and when she finally talks, it comes out slower than her usual managed cadence, like she's decided, sitting there in the dark, that I've earned the unmanaged version.

"I keep thinking maybe he's not entirely wrong. Not the math — that part's stupid. But whether I'm actually choosing you or just filling a hole my dad left. Five years of being so sure I knew myself, and one cruel sentence from a man I don't even like anymore and I can't tell which parts are real and which are just old wiring."

I think about what Mom told me the morning I decided to stay — the story about Dad and the toddler and the breakfast, that's just plainly seeing what you're staying for.

"You know what stopped my father from ever looking at another job listing?" I say. "Mom told me. It wasn't the numbers. It was watching thirteen-year-old me feed toddler Chris breakfast without being asked, and understanding exactly what he'd be walking away from if he left." I press my lips to the top of her head. "I've been trying to figure out my version of that moment since I got back. I think it's this. Right here. You, in the dark, giving me the true thing instead of the managed one, because you trust me enough to let me see you like this. That's not old wiring, Sophie. That's just you. It's the thing I'm staying for."

"I'm scared this is going to keep happening. Chris, or the town, or somebody else deciding they get an opinion about whether I'm allowed to have this."

"They don't get a vote," I say. "Not Chris. Not Aunt Carol. Not anybody at the hardware store with a theory about our age gap. This is ours. Nobody else decides what it's worth."

"Say that again."

"This is ours."

She turns into me fully, finally, and lets me hold her the way I don't think she's let anyone hold her in longer than either of us knows. I don't try to fix it further. I just stay.

"I'm not going anywhere," I tell her, into her hair. "I know you've heard that before and had it turn out to be a lie. I can't undo that history for you. I can only keep showing up until the evidence outweighs it."

"That might take a while."

"I've got time. I turned down two hundred thousand dollars for time, remember?"

She laughs and I feel it against my chest and hold her tighter, and somewhere in the space of that laugh, something in her starts, slowly, to unclench.

"I love you," I say. Plain. No detour, no roundabout gesture standing in for it. Just the fact of it, out loud, for the first time.

She goes still against me for a second. Then: "I love you too." A small, wet laugh. "Now shut up and hold me, Guilligan. You've done enough talking for one day."

18

Sophie

Ilove you too.

I feel the words leave my mouth before I've fully decided to say them, and then they're just out there, sitting in the dark of my living room next to the succulent and the ache still sitting low in my chest from a day that tried, in every possible way, to convince me I wasn't worth this.

“Now shut up and hold me, Guilligan,” I say, wet-eyed and only half joking. “You’ve done enough talking for one day.”

He does. Arms tight around me, chin resting on the top of my head, and for a minute that’s all it is—just being held, just breathing, just letting the day finally finish happening to me instead of bracing for the next hit.