"Have you said anything to Will about me?" was Jess's opener when they had settled into the booth. "Assuming you're in contact with him of course. Guess I shouldn't assume anything about either of you at this stage. Such an odd situation we're in, isn't it?"

Jay sipped some of his beer. "It sure is. But I don't find it odd in a bad way. Since I got over the initial shock, I've been looking forward to learning more about you. As for Will, I've not said anything to him yet. Figured I'd wait until after tonight so that I had more to tell him about you."

Her expression showed she thought that made sense. "You guys are on good terms then? Does he live in Chicago? All I know at the moment is he no longer works at Chicago Med."

"Yeah, this is where I've got some bad news for you. He left Chicago to move with his partner, another doctor called Natalie. Then, a few months ago she got a job offer in Germany for ridiculous money, so they've moved over there. You'll probably have to fly to Europe if you want to meet him in person."

"Well that sucks. You don't think he'll come back to visit some time?"

"Maybe, but I doubt it. There's no beef between us, but we're not close. Never have been. Besides, he's a doctor. They're always a bit self-absorbed in my opinion. He's over there doing his thing, and good luck to him. That might have sounded like I'm talking him down a bit, but that's not my intention. I figure it's best to be honest with you about what to expect."

Jess drank some beer and considered that. "Honesty is best for sure," she said eventually. "Getting to know each other and maybe connect as siblings is going to take time. Openness and honesty will help the process. So, what can you tell me about yourself? You're a cop, obviously."

"I am," he said with a smile, before going on to lay out his working history - starting with his service in the army, to joining the police, to being selected for Intelligence, through leaving Intelligence for Bolivia, before finally coming back to the unit again. Jess listened to it all attentively while working on her beer.

"That's some story, Jay. You're obviously a very courageous and talented man. Do you have a partner on that roller coaster ride with you? Any kids?"

Only then did Jay consider that Jess might have kids. There was no wedding ring on her finger, he had already checked that.

"No kids," he said. "There is someone in my life. Erin." He went on to briefly tell her that story, conscious of how much of the time was being spent talking about him.

Jess laughed when he finished the story by saying he'd had a successful first date with Erin on their latest attempt at a relationship the previous night. "So I showed up in the morning, then you had a big date in the evening. Quite a day that must have been."

"And then some," Jay said, also laughing. There was a good vibe between them already, which he was really pleased about. "So, enough about me for a while. Do you have a partner? Kids?"

"No to both," she said with a hint of regret. "I've been single for almost a year now. The guy I was with wanted more time from me than he was ever going to get, so we had to go our separate ways. I've not had much time for dating since, mainly for the reason that relationship failed: I work a lot."

Jay drained his beer. "Do you want another drink? Then you can tell me about being a crime scene cleaner. That's something I've been looking forward to learning about."

Jess chuckled. "That's one perk of the job - everyone wants to talk about it when they meet me. Yes, I'll have another drink. It's my turn to get them though. Same again?"

"Please," Jay said pleasantly.

She got up and headed for the bar. Jay took out his phone and found a text from Erin asking how it was going. He quickly replied, saying it was going well and he liked his first impressions of Jess, but it still didn't feel like he was talking to a sister. Those feelings and that bond would take time to build, he thought, assuming it happened at all.

With the message sent, he put his phone away and waited for Jess to return. It didn't take too long. The service at this bar was efficient.

"Here you go," she said cheerfully when she returned to the booth, setting Jay's beer in front of him.

"Thank you. So, how did you get into crime scene cleaning?"

Jess grinned. "That's a simple one. No deep story to it. I watched a documentary on crime scene cleaners when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen. It absolutely fascinated me and by the end of the show I had decided that was what I wanted to do one day. I was set on it, and I got into it as soon as I graduated school."

"You didn't have to go to college for it?"

"No. You do training courses when you get an entry level job with a company. There's a lot to learn, from assessing a scene to handling hazardous materials, to dealing with bereaved families. There's a lot more to crime scene cleaning that turning up with a mop and a bucket."

Jay laughed, appreciating the humour. "Yeah, I figured it wasn't that simple. So, talk to me about the work you actually do. Because some crime scenes are a real, real mess. And sometimes those real messes are in people's homes, people's stores, or whatever."

"First of all it's about what kind of scene are we walking into. Has someone stroked out in bed and started decomposing? Has someone put a gun in their mouth? Is it a meth lab, or even worse a fentanyl lab? Or is it a house where a hoarder has been living?"

"You clean hoarder houses too?"

"Not in my current job with the city, but I have done when working for private contractors, and I will when I launch my own company. We'll come to that later."

She spoke with a lot of confidence about her work, Jay noticed, much as he had done when telling her his story. It was the first shared personality trait he had discovered. Will had it too. Did it run in the family, or was it a coincidence?

"Cleaning out a hoarder's house is a lot different to cleaning up a fentanyl lab, I can figure that out for myself. But tell me more specifically," he said.

"It's about what you're cleaning and you protect yourself while you do it. It's a dangerous job if you're careless. If it's a dead body, homicide maybe, you can get away with a tyvek suit, latex gloves and an N95 mask. Those jobs are easy. Then there's things like hoarder houses or meth labs. Chemicals or mould in the air means you need a full face respirator on. They're harder to breathe in and they make you sweat. It gets tiring when you have to keep it on all day, and you're working hard. The worst is fentanyl though. You'll well know how dangerous that stuff is."

"Oh yeah," he assured her. Fentanyl had become a curse of big cities like Chicago, and worryingly its supply and usage rates were still skyrocketing.

"When it's fentanyl it's a full face mask with an air tank on your back. Heavy duty suit, heavy duty rubber gloves, and you have to tape around your hood and the ends of your sleeves to keep your suit fully sealed. Again, you're not like that for ten minutes, it's a least an hour at a time between breaks. Those air tanks are heavy too, and you're working hard at cleaning while you're wearing all that. Also, you know you can't screw up because of the dangerous situation you're in. It keeps you fit, let's just say that."

Jay nodded, conveying his new appreciation for how hard her job was. "How long would a fentanyl lab take to clean out?"

"Couple of days at the very least. Could be a week. It's totally a case by case thing, depending how big it is and how it has been left. Keep in mind, this isn't the kind of cleaning you might do at home at the weekend. This is coming into places that are often in horrendous, dangerous states, and leaving them absolutely spotless. You can't go into a home after someone shoots themselves and miss a bit of brain matter behind the couch because if you do, someone in that family is going to find it and that would be beyond traumatic for them."

"Makes sense," he acknowledged. Her job was not only backbreaking work, and dangerous, it also came with a lot of responsibility. "What's the money like?"

Jess downed some of her beer. "I'm salaried at my current job. With you being a detective, safe to say you make more than I do. That's why I'm starting my own company. I was pretty much all set to launch it when my mom had her heart attack."

That was something Jay knew he couldn't let pass by without changing the subject. For obvious reasons, Jess's mom was another topic that needed exploring in depth since apparently his dad he at least slept with her, if not had a full-blown affair.

"That's why your mom died? A heart attack?"

"Yes. She had her first one in the morning, just after breakfast. Luckily a neighbour was there with her at the time or she'd have died right there in her kitchen, and I'd never have known about you or Will. But the neighbour gave her CPR, paramedics showed up quickly, and they were able to revive her. She was in a really bad way though. Really bad. That evening, she had another heart attack at the hospital and died. In the meantime, I had a chance to talk to her. She knew she was dying, so we got to say our goodbyes. And, as you know, she came clean about who my dad was and who his sons are."

"That's a really sad story, Jess. I'm sorry for your loss."

"Thank you," she said, looking down at the table for a moment. The pain and grief were still there for her, inevitably.

"I have to ask. Do you know how your mom knew my dad? It's hard for me to accept that he cheated on my mom. I believe it, but accepting it? That's tough."

Jess looked him in the eyes and he got a small sense of connection to her for the first time. It was a thoroughly messed up situation that they had both been plunged into unexpectedly. To an extent, they were trying to guide each other through it.

"Saying I understand how you feel would be a lie," she said. "But maybe it's a similar way to how I felt when I learned that my mom had spent thirty-four years telling me she didn't know who my dad was, only for me to find out she had known all along and by the time she told me, he was dead."

Jay shook his head and took a deep breath. The more he thought about the situation, the more messed up it seemed from both of their points of view. "That is an awful thing to do to a child. To a person."

"It is," Jess said, obviously hurting now because of it. "As to how she knew your dad? I don't know. She worked at a bar for a lot of years, and she was really good-looking when she was younger. No doubt plenty of men would have shown an interest."

Including my dad, Jay thought, resenting him for it. This time though, he wasn't going to make the mistake of lashing out at Jess over it. It wasn't her fault. He drank some beer to give himself a moment to find some composure.

"Where was this bar?" he asked when he put his glass back down on the table.

She gave him the address, and Jay winced. "That's a couple of blocks from where my dad worked. I still can't..." He stopped himself. He needed to stop saying he couldn't believe it when it was becoming increasingly obvious what had happened.

"What was he like?" Jess asked, filling the silence after his unfinished sentence.

Jay didn't want to talk about his dad while he was feeling so angry with him, but it was only natural for Jess to want to know. For the first time, he pushed through in order to help his sister, telling her about their dad and what it had been like growing up in the Halstead house. That took them to the end of their second drinks, giving Jay a chance to leave the table and engineer a subject change in the process.

"My round. Another?" he said, motioning to her glass.

"Yes, please. And Jay? Thank you for telling me about him. I could tell it wasn't easy for you given how you're feeling right now."

"You're welcome," he said before quickly getting up and making his way to the bar. He was just glad that part of the night's conversation was over. He wondered how long it would be before he stopped feeling anger when he thought about his dad.

By the time he returned to the table with the drinks, Jay had got himself back on track, ready to continue talking to Jess with a positive mindset.

"You were going to tell me about your plan to start a company," he said as he put the drinks down.

Jess smiled. "Thank you. Yes, I was. I've got a whole business plan written out. What I got to figuring was I'm very good at my job. There's a lot of money in crime scene cleaning. So why am I doing it for the city when I could do it for myself and make way more money? We both know this city is never going to run short on crime scenes, so finding work will not be an issue. I've saved up twenty grand for start-up costs. That'll include a van, renting an industrial unit, buying cleaning equipment and PPE."

"Twenty grand to start the company? That's a lot of money," he said, feeling impressed enough that she had saved that much, let alone being gutsy enough to sink it all into starting a company. He couldn't recall ever having twenty grand saved in his life.

"It is a lot of money, but the profit margins in crime scene cleaning work are very high. And as I said, finding business won't be hard. I've already spoken to the guy who hires contractors for the city and he assured me he's got work coming out of his butt. Crime scene cleans are currently backed up and dealt with under a priority system, meaning I could almost take my pick of what jobs I want. Another bonus of my line of work is inflation isn't a negative. Actually it's a positive. Inflation is one of the reasons drug labs are spreading like wildfire right now as people resort to crime to make money."

Jay felt incredibly impressed. Jess didn't just know how to clean crime scenes, she was a smart and savvy businesswoman by the sound of it. At least, she was capable of being once she had the company launched. He was intrigued by the whole idea and wanted to know more.

"So, let's go with the worst job. Fentanyl lab. What would you be charging to clean up one of those?"

"A decent-sized fentanyl lab, like one I did for the city a few weeks ago? That took us a week. I'd be looking for a hundred grand for that at least. Again, pricing would be case by case to get into specifics."

Jay looked at her with raised eyebrows. "A hundred grand for a week's work? There's that kind of money in it?"

"For a fentanyl lab, yeah. As I said the profit margins are really high. That's the benefit of being a specialist trade. Things like homicides go for a lot less."

Now fully engaged in the discussion, Jay leaned forward, picturing a scenario in his head. "Okay, so let's say Intelligence, my unit, roll on a house where a witness in one of our cases has been tracked down by someone they're informing on. We breach, but we're too late. The witness is shot dead on the living room floor and the killer is fleeing out of a side window. We go after him, catch him, and we likely never set foot in that house again. Eventually, it comes your way. What's that worth to you?"

He could tell Jess was loving this conversation too. It was written all over her face. "I've got to say, it's so cool having a brother who has crime as a shared interest with me."

They both burst out laughing at how that sounded.

"That's not really what I meant," she said through the laughter. "You know what I'm trying to say."

"I do," he said, smiling broadly. "So, that crime scene. What are you charging?"

"A rough idea? Fifteen grand."

"Wow. I'm in the wrong line of work," he said, making her laugh again.

"I wanted to wait until I had the seed money saved up on my own. Didn't want to have to take out a loan. As I said, I was pretty much ready to get into launching the company when mom had her heart attack. Since then I've needed to grieve and get through her funeral, so I've done nothing more on it."

"You've clearly got a lot of business sense," he said in admiration. "And you mentioned you have two YouTube channels also? What are they?"

"One is for cleaning tips and advice. Not crime scene cleaning, regular cleaning. For example I'll make a ten minute video on how to properly clean a toilet or a fifteen minute one on a kitchen cleaning routine."

"People watch that stuff?" Jay asked, somewhat surprised.

"Hell yeah. Cleaning, organising, decluttering, there are a lot of people looking for advice on those things. Every video I put on that channel now gets 50k views as a bare minimum. There a few with over a million. I went past the two million subscriber mark on that channel a few months back."

"A million views on a video? Two million subs? Damn, seriously well done," he said, genuinely impressed again. "And your other channel?"

Jess drank some more beer, her expression showing she appreciated the praise. "That one is more of a hobby. It's for me singing cover versions of songs I like. Some of those get good views too though. I know how to work YouTube and get engagement. That's going to go on the back burner when I start my company though because I'm going to start a crime scene cleaning channel under my company's name. I expect that to do quite well."

He nodded. "Good idea. So, YouTube makes you money too, right?"

"It does. And I have a for people who like my channel to donate to me if they so choose. All told, I make a good chunk of extra money per month thanks to YouTube. It has helped me with saving the money to start the company."

The more they talked, the more Jay got the impression that his sister really had her head screwed on. He also discovered that she also owned a house, albeit with a mortgage. It made him feel a little bad about his own situation, not having much in the way of savings and having to rent an apartment.

They talked for another hour, over two more beers each, and by the time Jay ordered an Uber to take them both home, dropping Jess off first, he was happy that were through the most awkward 'getting to know you' stage. He could hardly have been more pleased with how the night had gone. He liked Jess, and got the feeling she liked him too. There was a positive, warm vibe there. They were going to get along, which suggested that in time they might form the sibling bond that he hoped for.

Outside, waiting for the Uber to show up, he decided to float an idea. "I've enjoyed tonight, Jess. A lot. Getting to know you has been fun."

"Yeah, me too," she said contentedly. "My brother is a nice guy, and he's kind of badass too. Your military service and the dangerous things you do with Intelligence, I'd never have the guts. So yeah, don't think I could have asked for more from tonight."

"I'd like you to meet Erin, and the rest of the team if you'd be up for it? Once they find out I've got a sister they're all going to want to meet you."

"Sounds like you're close-knit unit?"

"We are. They're my friends as much as colleagues. We'd all take a bullet for each other no questions asked."

"Then I'd be happy to meet them," Jess said, showing the confidence he was beginning to expect. "Call me when you know when and where?"

"I will," he promised. "And I'll get on to Will and tell him about you too. Are you okay with me giving him your number if he wants to call you?"

"Yeah, that would be good of you. I'd appreciate it. This has been a nice time, Jay. Thank you."

"No, thank you," he replied, already thinking ahead to giving Erin a glowing review of the evening when he called her as soon as he got home.

A/N: A lot of character development for Jess in this chapter, but it was needed as Jay had to start getting to know her. What are your impressions of her?