Stand-In Wife by Karina Bliss

the motorway exit and nudged his front-seat passenger.
    “Nearly there, Charlie,” he said in a low voice.
    His brother opened his eyes, his normally ruddy complexion pale with grief. “I’m awake.” He glanced behind at his daughter, then at the off-ramp approaching through the misty morning rain. The buzz cut he’d adopted when his light brown hair started thinning highlighted his solid jaw and jutting brow, and made him appear older than his twenty-nine years. Today he looked forty.
    “You get any sleep?” Ross asked.
    “No. I’ve been thinking about what needs to be done. Drop Tilly off, go to Mum’s…” His voice wavered and he bought himself a recovery moment by pulling a pen and paper out of his day pack. “Phone people,” he added gruffly, making a note. “Meet with the funeral director, check in at work.” As the owner of a small construction company he generally had three builds on the go at any one time.
    “Shit,” Charlie muttered under his breath. Glancing athis brother, Ross saw him frowning. “I rescheduled some critical jobs to make time for camp and the Master Builders’ conference next weekend.” Charlie was on the committee. “At least two will have to be squeezed in before the funeral. That doesn’t leave much time to organize the service Mum would have wanted.”
    Bells and whistles, knowing Linda.
    “I can help.” Officially Ross was on sick leave for another month. Unofficially he haunted the SAS’s headquarters, rehoning what skills he was able to.
    Without comment, his CO had begun using him, usually as a guest commentator at instructor classes on his particular area of expertise—demolitions.
    Sometimes, like yesterday, he sent Ross home to rest. “More haste, less speed,” he’d reminded him. But rest and Ross were incompatible.
    “I couldn’t ask you,” Charlie asked. Ross had made it clear over recent months that family and friends came second to his rehab goals.
    “You’re my brother.” No matter what I felt about your mother. “And you’re not doing this alone. What’s on your list?”
    Charlie stared blankly at the notepad. The poor bastard was still in shock. “Ordering flowers, choosing hymns and sorting out catering for after the service.” He tried to smile. “Right up your alley.”
    “I’m on it.” Mentally Ross scanned his female acquaintances but none jumped out as a culinary-skilled, flower-arranging churchgoer.
    His brother’s former neighborhood—where they were now dropping Tilly with her mum—was lined with staked saplings that reflected the age of the subdivision. Aspirational living, according to the real estate brochures. All Ross saw were characterless brick bungalows and cripplingmortgages, but hey, each to their own. After the separation, Charlie had moved into his mother’s so he could still afford the payments and in turn lessen the disruption for the kids. Ross hoped Meredith appreciated it.
    He pulled into her driveway, and turned off the engine but Charlie made no move to wake Tilly.
    “Give me a minute,” he rasped. “It comes in waves, you know?”
    “Yeah.” Sometimes Ross sat out on his deck in the dark, cocooned by the surrounding bush and let pain off its leash. It didn’t always come back when he called. Seventeen months after the ambush, he found it hard to grasp that his SAS brothers, Lee and Steve, wouldn’t walk through the door, clap him on the shoulder and say, “It was a bad dream, Ice. We’re the Indestructibles, remember?”
    Acceptance was a thousand little daily adjustments—a thousand little deaths. He squeezed his brother’s shoulder. “Listen, you want to stay with me a couple of nights, rather than at Linda’s?” His place was in Muriwai, a black-sand beach on the coast, a forty-five-minute drive west.
    “It’s easier being in town but…” Charlie looked up hopefully. “You could stay with me?”
    “Well…” Ross would have sworn he’d kept his expression neutral.
    “No, stupid