9. Sophie
Sophie
Idon't cry until I'm home.
I make it through the drive, up the stairs, through the door. Keys on the counter, shoes off. Then I sit on my couch in the dark and let myself fall apart.
I'm such an idiot.
I knew. I knew this was temporary and I agreed to it. I liked the safety of the expiration date, remember? That's what makes it safe, Sophie. You know where it ends.
Except somewhere between that night and tonight I stopped believing the expiration date.
I stopped protecting myself. I let myself fall for Grant Guilligan, my ex-brother in law, the man who is definitely leaving, and then when he said maybe I don't want to leave I had the audacity to panic about it.
I can't decide if that's growth or just a new flavor of the same problem.
I sit on the couch until there's nothing left to cry, and then I stare at my phone.
Grant: I'm sorry. That was unfair. I don't know what I want yet.
The honest answer makes it worse, somehow. At least if he were lying, I could be straightforwardly angry. But he's not lying. He genuinely doesn't know. And I can't wait around in the uncertainty of his not-knowing, building my life around a maybe.
***
I don't see Grant for three days.
We text about Patty's appointments. Brief, professional, calibrated messages that communicate only the information they contain and nothing else. I am extremely good at this particular type of communication. I spent five years practicing it with Chris.
That comparison is not as comforting as I'd like it to be.
Tuesday is chemo day. I get to the hospital before them, which means I'm standing near the nurses' station when the elevator opens and they walk out. Grant looks tired. His hair is messier than usual. He's been running his hands through it.
Good. I haven't been sleeping either.
Though I immediately feel bad about good, because Patty is the one going through chemotherapy and my scorecard of who's sleeping worst is not the most useful thing I could be tracking.
"Sophie!" Patty lights up.
"Hi, sweetheart." I hug her carefully. "How are you feeling?"
"Tired of being asked. But better that you're here."
I settle into the chair beside her. Grant's on the other side with his laptop open, pretending to work with the focus of a man who is very much not working.
The air between us is thick with everything we're not saying.
"You should come to dinner Thursday," Patty says. "I'm making lasagna."
My eyes flick to Grant. His eyes flick to mine.
"I don't know if—"
"Nonsense. You're family. Grant will be there. Six o'clock." She closes her eyes. "Now I'm going to nap. These meds always make me drowsy. You two will have to manage the silence on your own."
She's asleep in four minutes. The IV pump beeps steadily.
Grant closes his laptop. "Sophie."
"Not here."
"We need to talk."
"Not here, Grant."
He's quiet for a moment. "Thursday. After dinner."
"Fine."
We sit in silence. I pull out my phone and scroll through nothing. He opens his laptop back up and doesn't type. After twenty minutes, he says quietly, without looking up, "I haven't stopped thinking about you."
My chest tightens. "Grant—"
"I know. Not here." He's still looking at his screen. "But I needed you to know that. Three days and I haven't stopped."
I don't respond. Can't. Because the same is true for me.
I've caught myself reaching for my phone a dozen times a day to text him something small and stupid, a joke about a patient, a complaint about hospital coffee, and stopping myself every time, and if I say it out loud we'll be back in the conversation we agreed not to have yet.
Patty stirs and opens one eye. "You're both terrible liars," she says groggily, and closes it again.
***
Thursday arrives at the speed of a calendar that is personally invested in my discomfort.
I show up at six with wine, which feels slightly absurd given the situation but is nonetheless correct behavior. Grant answers the door.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
We stand in the doorway for a beat too long until Patty calls from the kitchen, and Grant steps aside, and our arms brush when I walk past him. That brief contact does things I'm trying to manage.
This is going to be a long dinner.
It is, in fact, a long dinner, and also a perfect one.
Patty's lasagna is as good as I remembered.
We sit at the kitchen table where I used to have Sunday dinners when I was married to Chris, and it feels different now — the chair I'm in, the space, the company.
Better. Which is information I'm not examining during dinner.
Grant is quiet. He eats and drinks his wine and watches me when he thinks I'm not looking, and every time I catch him at it something in my chest does a small, undisciplined flip that I've stopped being able to suppress, three days of careful distance apparently no match for the man sitting across a plate of lasagna from me like I'm the only interesting thing in the room.
I am always looking.
After dinner, I help with dishes. Grant takes out the trash. Patty supervises from her chair.
"You two are being weird," she says.
"We're not—"
"Sophie. I've known you for six years." She studies me. "Is this about the leaving?"
I dry a plate with more focus than it requires. "He's leaving in eight weeks. I'm staying here. That's all."
"That doesn't have to be all."
"Yes, it does." I set the plate down. "Patty, I can't — you're his mother. I don't want to put you in the middle of whatever this is."
"You're not putting me anywhere." She stands and crosses to me, takes my hands.
"I'm choosing to be here. For both of you.
" She squeezes. "I know my son is scared.
I know he's spent twenty years running from anything that looks permanent.
But he cares about you. More than he's letting himself admit. "
"That doesn't change the fact that he's leaving."
"Not if he chooses to stay."
Grant comes back in. Looks between us with the expression of a man who has walked in on something and is deciding whether to walk back out.
Patty pats my shoulder. "I'm going upstairs to watch my show. The porch is nice this time of evening." She walks past Grant. "Talk to her."
Grant and I stand in the kitchen in the silence she leaves behind.
"Porch?" he says.
"Yeah. Okay."
The porch swing. Where we had our first real conversation. The sky is orange and pink, and the neighborhood sounds are normal and unhurried.
"I called David Kowalski," Grant says.
I go still. "What?"
"Yesterday. Told him I needed more time before I commit to the Brazil contract. He needs my answer by end of the month."
"What are you going to tell him?"
"I don't know yet." He runs a hand through his hair — the gesture I've catalogued as his version of anxious. "I've been taking every contract for twenty years. Never questioned it. Never thought about what I was leaving behind. This time I'm thinking about it."
"Because of me."
"Because of you. Because of Mom. Because I'm forty-three years old and I keep asking myself what I'm actually building." He looks at me. "Not in some country I'll leave in eighteen months. Here."
I want to hope. I'm trying to manage the wanting-to-hope, the way you manage anything you know can hurt you badly if you let your guard down even a fraction.
"What do you want me to say?" I ask.
"What do you want. What you actually want."
"It doesn't matter what I want. You're the one who has to decide."
"Yes, it does."
"No." I meet his eyes. "You have to want this for yourself. Not because I asked, not because your mom asked. Because you want a life here. And I can't make that decision for you. I wouldn't try to."
"What if I want it for us?"
My chest aches. "There is no us, Grant. Not officially. We were friends with benefits. That was the deal."
"The deal was a bad deal." His voice is rough. "I'm falling for you, Sophie. I have been since the moment I saw you on that porch five weeks ago. Maybe since longer."
"Don't say that."
"Why not?"
"Because it makes everything harder. Because now when you leave—" My voice catches on something I wasn't planning to say, and it comes out anyway, quieter than I mean it to.
"Because I've spent my whole life being the reason people almost stayed, Grant.
Almost isn't the same as staying. I don't think I can survive one more almost."
Something in his face shifts — like I've handed him a piece of information he didn't have, which, I realize, I haven't given him before, not this directly, not out loud.
"I'm not going to leave."
"You don't know that. Not yet." I stand up, needing to move.
"Two weeks. You have two weeks to decide.
If you can actually build a life here. Not for me.
For yourself. And if you take the contract—" My voice catches.
"If you decide to go, I need you to leave clean.
No dragging it out. No promises you can't keep. "
"Sophie—"
"Promise me."
His jaw is tight. "I'm not going to leave."
"Promise me anyway."
A long silence. "Okay. If I take it, I'll leave clean."
"Thank you."
We sit on the porch swing as the sun finishes setting. His arm comes around me and I let myself lean into him and have this moment, because I have learned to take the moments I'm given without trying to engineer them into something permanent.
In two weeks, I'll know.
I leave around nine. Grant walks me to my car and kisses me goodbye like we're a real couple and not two people negotiating the terms of their own uncertainty.
When I get home, there's a text from Patty.
Patty: Whatever you two are working through, I'm rooting for you.
I stare at the message for a long moment.
Me: Thank you. I love you.
Patty: Love you too, honey.
I set my phone down and look at the succulent.
Still alive. Still holding on despite my best efforts at inconsistent watering and complicated emotions.
Maybe Grant is worth the risk.