Page 39 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

Armin reviews the progress with me on Tuesday and pronounces it clean. “He suspects weather,” he says. “A bad month. He has blamed two subordinates and his golf swing, in that order, to three separate people who reported it to me.”

“And Witte. His questions.”

“Slowing. Witte reads erosion faster than your stepbrother does. He is recalculating what, exactly, he was invited to invest in.”

Good. That is the entire campaign in one line. Let the buyer watch the asset shrink.

Hugo chose this fight the day he married into Witte’s house without a word to me. That move made the organization look porous in front of the entire city. That, I cannot abide. Not professionally, because porous gets tested.

So the work proceeds, quiet and correct, and it would be a satisfying week if not for the other issue that has crept up in my life. The one where Luna has begun sounding wrong on the phone.

I call her on Tuesday evening. She answers on the fourth ring, which is new, and her voice sounds like it is wearing an ill-fitting coat. It’s not the words. It’s the tone. “… the shop was busy. The new wicks came. Hairy is well, thanks for asking.”

“I asked how your day is going.”

“Right.” She pauses. “And I told you.”

Perhaps it is merely a generational thing. Her people are not phone people.

“Very well. Talk later?”

“Sounds good.” A crisp click follows.

I sit with the phone afterward. Tone, flat. Tempo, fast. Laughter, absent. The woman who narrates her life to me at length in texts, gone.

Something is wrong.

I call on Wednesday. Same ill-fitting coat, same four minutes on the phone.

I don’t know how to ask her what’s wrong. The sentence exists. I’ve heard other men say it.What’s wrong? Talk to me. But in my mouth, it converts such things into interrogation.

When I think of asking, that’s where my thoughts go.

I’ve spent thirty years asking questions of people who were lying to me, and all my asking is built from that, the angles, the pressure, the watching for the tell. You cannot aim that at a woman you’re in—at her. You cannot aim thatather.

I sit in my office at the top of my city, a man who can dismantle a rival without fingerprints and cannot ask one woman one honest question over a telephone. The asymmetry would be funny in another man’s life.

I do what I do when a direct approach fails. I deploy an asset, and the best asset in my arsenal for a closed door is currently rolling out dough in my kitchen.

Darya puts down her knife and looks at me with the weariness of a woman who has watched a man circle a point for sixty seconds too long, which I have. “What is wrong with her?”

“Kind of you to assume it’s something wrong with her.”

She levels an arched brow at me. “I don’t. Not really. But you men, you always blame a woman for your problems. So, as you see things, what is wrong with her?”

I don’t like admitting this. “I don’t know.”

“You asked?”

“I called twice.”

“Calling is not asking.” She wipes her hands, already in motion, a one-woman mobilization. “Sick or sad, it doesn’t matter which, the treatment is the same. I have borscht from Sunday, the good pot. I will take it myself.”

“Darya.”

“You will say I shouldn’t interfere.” She’s packing the container as she says it, cutting bread, wrapping the bread for travel. “You are wrong.”

This sits ugly with me. “I’m your boss, if you remember.”