Page 25 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Has Jaba done anything actionable?”

“Not yet. Not officially.”

“Find out who this is.” I push the photograph back. “And pull Jaba out of anything sensitive until we know more. I don’t want him near the Volkov discussion.”

“Already done.” Armin stands. He has the efficiency of a man who solves problems before he’s asked to. “One more thing. He’s going to notice he’s been sidelined.”

“Da.”

“He’ll make noise about it.”

“Let him make noise.” I meet Armin’s eyes. “Controlled noise is better than the alternative.”

Armin nods once, picks up his phone, and goes.

The sitting room is quiet when I come out. Luna is on the couch where I left her—or she was. At some point, she tipped sideways into the cushions, the Bulgakov open on her chest, pages down.

She’s asleep.

Her black hair fans across the armrest and the white streak at her hairline catches the afternoon light that’s started to come through the high windows, that pale ribbon luminous against the dark. One hand is curled near her face. She breathes evenly.

I stand in the doorway for longer than is sensible.

She’s asleep on my couch with my book, with my housekeeper’s good coffee cup still on the side table. She didn’t try to leave. She asked about my books. She had a conversation with Darya about bread.

What is this?

I’m used to a particular kind of response from people. Wariness. Deference. I’ve made peace with it. It’s the cost of what I am and how I built it. You do not get to be what I am without becoming something people don’t relax around.

Yet, Luna is asleep on my couch.

I get a blanket from the hall closet—the good one, the heavy linen—and I bring it back and lay it over her without disturbing the book on her chest. She doesn’t wake. Her face in sleep is very young and very peaceful, and I look at it for another moment longer than I should.

Then I go back to my office, and I don’t think about what it means that I stood there watching her, or about Darya’s coffee cup, or about the wordstaysaid half into a pillow in the gray early morning.

I don’t think about any of it. I certainly don’t fight thinking about it for the next hour.

9

LUNA

“Your extremely weird situationship,”Cherry announces on Tuesday, apropos of the inventory we are allegedly counting, “has now lasted longer than two of my engagements. Combined. I’m just putting numbers on the board.”

I look up from the carton. “You’ve been married twice?”

“I’ve been married four times, baby, keep up. Two of them were short.” She ticks a box on the clipboard without looking at it, because her actual count is happening on my face.

“Husband two and husband three together lasted nineteen months, but we were engaged in the first few weeks,” she continues. “Your gentleman caller is at four weeks and climbing, with car service. Do the math. All I’m saying is, a man sends a car, that’s not a situationship anymore. That’s a situation. The ship sailed.”

I open a carton of jar lids and do not dignify this, mostly because she’s right and we both know it, and being right makes Cherry insufferable in a way I deeply enjoy from a minimum distance of six feet. She hums something victorious and moves down theshelf, four husbands deep in credentials, case closed without my testimony.

Mike surfaces from the back with a box cutter and impeccable timing, hair already escaping whatever it was doing this morning. “Wait, are you seeing someone? Is it serious? Is he nice? Does he—oh my God, the new wax came.” And he’s gone, pulled into the orbit of forty pounds of soy blend the way the tide is pulled by the moon, conversation cheerfully abandoned mid-sentence, and that is the entire interrogation I’ll ever receive from Mike.

I love him for it.

Hairy gets the real briefing at lunch, per protocol. He hangs at the front of his tank while I eat my Italian beef and lay out the situation, the gala, the restaurant, the blanket I woke up under, the door to his office standing open in a way that felt like it meant something. Hairy works his little mouth through all of it, which I choose to read as thoughtful.

“I know,” I tell him. “I noticed that, too. The blanket was cashmere, Hairy. There was a blanket protocol in place, and nobody briefed me.”