Brother in Law with Benefits (Forbidden Love in Copper Falls #2)

1. Grant

Grant

The Welcome to Copper Falls sign looks exactly the same as it did the day I left. Same peeling paint on the posts. Same bullet holes from teenagers who had too much time and not enough sense. Same lie about this place being "A Great Place to Call Home."

I downshift the rental truck as Main Street comes into view.

Storefronts I remember and storefronts I don't, layered over each other like the town couldn't decide what decade it wanted to be.

The diner's still there. The hardware store's got a new sign.

Somebody opened a wine bar where the shoe repair place used to be.

The houses get smaller as I drive, paint less fresh, yards more practical than pretty. This is the part of Copper Falls where people actually live, not the downtown wine bars trying to convince passing tourists this place has charm.

Mom's house is white paint gone grey. Front porch sagging more than I remember. The flowerbeds Dad used to obsess over have gone to weeds — hostas choked out, the trellis he built for Mom's climbing roses leaning like it's given up waiting for him to fix it.

Dad.

I push that down hard and fast. Three years since the heart attack.

Three years since I was too far away, too deep in a contract, too fucking late.

I was six hours from a satellite phone that worked and it still took two days to get word, and by the time the Army cleared me to leave the site, the funeral was over and my mother was telling me not to bother coming home for it.

Your father would understand, Grant. Finish the job. That's what he'd want.

I've never decided if that was mercy or a life sentence.

The Army taught me to compartmentalize. Nineteen years of contract work perfected it.

You learn to put things in boxes and shut the lid, because a man who can't do that doesn't last long building water systems in places where the ground still has ordnance in it.

I got good at the boxes. I got so good at the boxes that I stopped noticing how many of them I was carrying until the plane started its descent into Chicago and every single one of them cracked open at once.

I park on the street. Mom's ancient Buick takes up most of the driveway, and I'm not sure the rental's suspension can handle the potholes anyway.

The front door opens before I reach the porch.

Sophie Guilligan steps out.

Not Mom. Sophie.

My brother's ex-wife.

She's wearing pale blue scrubs with cartoon teddy bears.

Her honey blonde hair is up in a ponytail, shadows under her eyes, purse over her shoulder, keys already in her hand.

She looks like someone who's been up too long and knows it, and still manages to look like the best thing I've seen in thirty-six hours of connecting flights and airport coffee.

She freezes when she sees me.

I freeze too.

Five years since I saw her walk down that aisle in white.

Five years since I danced with her at the reception and spent three minutes trying very hard to think about literally anything else — flow rates, deployment schedules, the exact torque spec on a pipe fitting, anything that wasn't the way she felt fitting against me like she'd been measured for it.

Five years since I left the next morning because staying felt like standing at the edge of something I couldn't afford to fall into.

"Grant." Her voice is exactly how I remembered. Warm and slightly raspy.

"Sophie."

We stare at each other. A car passes on Oak. Someone's mowing three houses down. Completely ordinary sounds from a completely ordinary afternoon, and none of it matches what's happening in my chest.

"I didn't know you were coming today," she says. "Patty said this week, but—"

"Flights got moved around." I sound like I'm giving a mission briefing. Clipped. Professional. Locked down. "Came straight from the airport."

"Right. That makes sense." She shifts her purse higher. "I was just leaving. Patty's resting, but she'll be excited to see you."

She moves to step around me. I shift to let her pass.

For a second we're close enough that I catch her scent of something clean and simple, soap and vanilla body spray.

I catalog it and hate myself a little for noticing it, five minutes back in this town and already doing exactly what I told myself on the flight over I wasn't going to do.

"Sophie." Mom's voice from inside. Sharp. Commanding. The voice that raised two boys and accepted exactly zero nonsense from either of us. "Did Grant's truck pull up or am I hallucinating from the anti-nausea meds?"

"He's here!" Sophie calls back, stepping away from me quickly.

Too quickly.

The feeling's mutual.

"Well don't leave him standing on the porch like a stranger. Get in here, both of you."

Sophie glances at me. Something moves through those blue-grey eyes — the specific exhaustion of a woman doing math on how much longer this day is going to ask of her. Then she goes inside and I follow.

The house smells like lemon Pledge and banana bread.

The living room looks frozen in time: same floral couch, same wood-paneled walls, same collection of family photos on the mantle I'm carefully not looking at.

Somewhere in that lineup is a photo from Chris's wedding, and I am not going to be the man who stares at it his first ten minutes home.

Mom sits in her recliner, feet up, blanket across her lap despite the late May warmth.

She looks smaller than I remember. Margaret "Patty" Guilligan has always been five-foot-nothing of Irish stubbornness and casserole-bearing determination.

Chemo has carved at least twenty pounds off her, and the purple wrap around her head makes her look fragile in a way I'm not ready for.

"There's my boy." She holds out her arms.

I cross the room and hug her carefully. Very carefully.

"Watch the port," she murmurs.

I loosen my grip immediately. The chemo port under her collarbone.

I know more about it than I ever wanted to, thanks to late-night research spirals in my Kabul apartment, reading about infusion schedules and neutrophil counts at three in the morning because it was the only thing I could do for her from eight thousand miles away.

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be careful." She pulls back and looks me over with the critical eye she deployed when I was seventeen and sneaking in the back door past curfew. "You look like hell."

"Thirty-six hours of travel."

"Mm." She pats my cheek, then looks past me to where Sophie's hovering near the front door. "Sophie, honey, stay for lunch. I made chicken salad this morning. I can make the sandwiches."

Sophie hesitates, then: "Okay. Just a quick one."

Mom shuffles toward the kitchen. I notice she's moving carefully, like each step requires planning, and I file that away too, another box, another thing I'm going to have to learn to carry now that I'm the one standing here instead of reading about it in a text message.

Sophie and I are left in the living room, not looking at each other.

"You don't have to stay," I say. "You've been pulling double duty with Mom. You should sleep."

"I'm fine."

"You have work tonight?"

"I said I'm fine." An edge under it. Defensive. She's been managing Patty's care for six months while I was gone, and she doesn't need me here for ten minutes deciding she looks tired. Fair. "I've been managing Patty's care for half a year. I think I can handle one more lunch."

I sit on the couch. Sophie takes the chair across from me — Dad's chair, though I don't say that. She perches on the edge like she's already calculating her exit.

We don't talk.

The clock on the mantle ticks. The refrigerator hums in the kitchen. Mom hums along with it, off-key, the same three bars of some hymn she's been humming since before either of us could walk.

"How was Afghanistan?" Sophie asks.

"Iraq, mostly. East Africa the last two years."

"Right. Sorry. I just remember Patty mentioning—" She cuts herself off. "It doesn't matter."

"It was fine. The work was good."

"Infrastructure development. Roads and water systems?"

I look at her.

She looks back, then away. "She talks about you." Sophie twists her hands in her lap. "Not a lot, but sometimes. She's proud of you."

Proud. The word sounds wrong. What's there to be proud of? I left. I stayed gone. I wasn't here when Dad died. I wasn't here for the diagnosis. I'm here now because I finally ran out of excuses.

"I'm just building things," I say.

"Important things. Things that help people."

"Should've been here helping my own people."

Sophie goes quiet. Then: "You're here now."

Mom calls us in.

We eat lunch at the kitchen table — the same table, the same chipped spot on the edge where Chris used to bang his spoon as a toddler, a piece of this family's history I've never once had to explain to Sophie because she's clearly already lived a year of Sunday dinners around it.

Mom supervises from her chair, looking pleased with herself in a way I recognize and don't entirely trust.

Sophie explains the medication schedule, the appointment calendar, the foods that help versus the ones that set off the nausea. She's got a whole system. Color-coded. Laminated.

"You made her a laminated schedule?" I ask. She’s more type-A than my field manager.

"Laminate survives a spilled coffee. Paper doesn't." She says it like it's obvious, like of course you laminate the thing that keeps your ex-mother-in-law alive on schedule, and I believe that I have never met anyone as competent as this woman in my entire adult life, and I've worked with combat engineers.

"She's too good to me," Mom says, not looking up from her plate.

"Always has been. More than my own flesh and blood, some days.

" A beat. "You know I called Karen — Sophie's mother — back in the winter, when we thought the first scan might come back bad.

Just to let her know, in case she wanted to be here for it. "

Sophie's fork goes still for half a second. Then it doesn't.

"Patty."