Page 24 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

She sets down two cups of coffee without being asked. She gives Luna the one with the painted handle—the good one, the one she uses for guests she respects. She gives me the plain one, same as always.

Luna doesn’t know the significance. She just wraps both hands around the cup and says, “Thank you, this smells amazing,” and Darya makes a sound that in her dialect means, ‘you’re welcome and I approve of this one.’

We eat at the kitchen table. Eggs, dark bread, sliced cucumber. Simple.

Luna asks Darya, “Is the bread from the bakery on Semyonova Street?”

Darya stares at her for a moment. “Yes. How do you know that bakery?”

“I own a candle shop not too far from it, and I try to frequent as many small businesses as I can. I was in the neighborhood one day, and I followed my nose to the shop. Their breads are a revelation.”

My housekeeper almost smiles, which, for her, is a smile. “They are. The owner is a friend of mine from back home…”

I drink my coffee and watch the two of them chat about bread and feel something that I have no word for.

Comfortable, maybe?

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt at ease enough to know what that word truly means, but it’s comfortable here. That’s the thing. It’s comfortable in a way my kitchen has never been comfortable—not in this apartment, not in any of the places before it.

I’ve had women at my table before. There was always a quality of performance to it, on both sides. They were charming. I was gracious.

We were both waiting for it to end.

This is something else. Luna leans back in her chair and asks me if I always make Darya cook or if I ever cook myself, and when I say I make decent borscht, she looks skeptical in a way that makes Darya snort into her coffee.

Alas. There is work to be done.

Armin arrives at ten, which he texted me about and I forgot to mention to Luna, so when the buzzer goes, she raises her eyebrows.

“My associate. Meeting. It will be an hour, maybe two.”

She considers this. “Do you have books?”

The shelf in the sitting room has forty years of accumulated reading—history, military strategy, an embarrassing number of crime novels I will not explain. I show her, and she walks along it with her coffee, head tilted, and pulls out a battered Bulgakov without asking permission.

“I’ll be on the couch,” she says.

“Don’t you have a shop to run? I don’t want to distract you.”

She blinks at me. “I have days off, you know.”

I never considered that staying here would be an option she would select. Neither the book nor the couch time. Not any of it.

I’m not entirely sure what to say. “Enjoy the book.”

Armin is waiting for me when I come to the office. “Jaba.”

“I assumed.”

Armin pulls a breath through his nose. “He’s been difficult since the Tbilisi thing. Mouthy. Getting into arguments with the other captains over nothing.” He pauses. “He set off on Mikhail two weeks ago at the warehouse. Over a scheduling dispute. I managed it, but Mikhail was ready to put him through the wall.”

“Jaba’s always had a temper.”

“This is different.” Armin looks at me steadily. “He’s not just angry. He’s loud. Sloppy-loud. He’s been drinking at Petrov’s bar four nights a week, running his mouth, and I don’t think he’s choosing his company carefully enough.” He shows a picture on his phone. A man I don’t recognize at a corner table, two seats from Jaba, both of them mid-conversation. “I can’t confirm who this is. But I don’t like what it could be.”

I look at the photograph for a long moment.

The man is nobody I know. The angle is wrong, face partially obscured, but the posture is off—too alert, too still for a casual bar patron. I’ve sat across from enough law to recognize a man who’s listening professionally.