Page 20 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

It’s still dark, still me, floor-length with a slit that behaves until I walk, but the color is warmer than black. I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time deciding what that meant before concluding it meant I liked the dress. Sometimes a dress is just a dress. Sometimes a woman tells herself that in a fitting room mirror while her own reflection declines to cosign.

Ivan’s guy, Lev, drives me to the gala in a car so quiet I can hear my own pulse. He says four words the entire ride, two of which are “miss” and two of which are “we’ve arrived,” and honestly, after a week of Cherry’s interrogations, the silence is a spa treatment.

Cherry’s final text reads,Report back everything. EVERYTHING.

Mike wants to know if there’ll be swans. I don’t know why Mike thinks there will be swans. Neither does Cherry. Neither, probably, does Mike.

Ivan’s waiting at the entrance, not checking his phone, his watch, or the perimeter. He’s watching the car, but it feels like he sees right through it, through my dress, that he sees me beyond my skin.

For some reason, I like that about him.

Here’s the thing nobody warned me about. I’ve now seen this man in a coat closet, a ballroom, an elevator, but the sight of him still does something to my insides. He’s in a midnight blue suit tonight, scarred hands quiet at his sides, and when he sees me for real, his whole face changes.

Not the polite-greeting change. The lines in his handsome, grizzled face fade for a flash, brief and unguarded, and then the usual control closes over the top.

It shouldn’t make me happy to see that I shake him. This is theater. I’m here to be seen on his arm by his idiot stepbrother. The happiness is staged.

It looks really, really real, though. That’s all I’m saying.

“Burgundy,” he says, by way of hello, taking my hand.

“You said the gala had a color scheme. I researched it. Did I get it right?”

“Da,” he says, scanning the room over my head with that air-traffic-control attention of his, and tucks my hand into his elbow, warm and certain, and we go in.

The gala is a fundraiser for a children’s hospital wing, which means 200 people in formalwear networking while a string quartet drowns out the noise. I clock Hugo, because my body apparently maintains a dedicated Hugo radar I’d love to have surgically removed.

He’s tan. Honeymoon tan, golf tan, the tan of a man who has never once worried about skin cancer because he has access to the best doctors in the city. He’s holding court near the silent auction with his head thrown back mid-laugh, and the laugh is the fake one, the one he practices. I’ve heard him practice it.

Then he sees us.

I feel it hit from twenty feet away. The laugh doesn’t stop, but it goes hollow in the middle, scooped out, and his eyes do a fast triangle, me, Ivan, my hand on Ivan’s arm, and his timing stumbles on whatever he says next, because the man he’s talking to has to ask him to repeat it.

Ivan doesn’t look over. Neither do I. We did this choreography at the wedding. Attention is currency, and we are running a deflation.

“He’s recalculating,” Ivan murmurs, accepting two glasses from a tray and handing me one without breaking his survey of the room.

“You can’t even see him.”

“I can see you watching him. Your face does a small accounting when something satisfies you. Lower lip, left side.”

I take a sip of champagne to reposition my lower lip on the left side. He watches me do it with one degree of a smile, and we proceed into the room.

What follows is two hours of Ivan conducting business the way other people breathe. Introductions without explanations, a word here about freight, a senator’s wife who wants to talk about candles the moment she learns what I do, and so on.

Somewhere in hour two, I recognize I’m enjoying myself, which was not on the itinerary. Hugo orbits the whole time, never approaching, drinking faster than his child bride notices. By the time we leave, he has the look of a man doing long division in his head and getting a different answer every time.

Mission, presumably, accomplished, invoice paid in full. I expect the car, the kiss, and possibly the elevator again if I’m honest about my expectations, which, around Ivan I’ve learned to be.

Instead, Ivan invites me to dinner.

“Wait, really?”

“I thought you might be hungry.”

“Starving, actually. I thought they’d at least feed you at an event like this.”

He smirks a little. “Sometimes. Sometimes not.” He motions with his head toward his fancy car, then opens the door for me. “So, dinner?”