Page 40 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

She laughs derisively. “Da. And boss, you’re wrong that I should not interfere. You want to know how she is. This is how a person finds out. You bring food, you sit, you say nothing with your mouth full. It works on everyone alive.”

“Perhaps I should leave you to the future interrogations. With methods like that, I might not have to break so many fingers.”

She huffs. “Only boys talk when there are broken fingers. I thought you interrogated men.”

I snort at the implication, and she leaves with the pot in a canvas bag, declining Lev twice, declining cab fare once, accepting only the dignity of the train. I attempt to work and produce, by the close of business, eleven readable pages. That’s it.

At four fifty, my phone sounds. The message is from Luna.

Did you just send your housekeeper to my place of business with a container of borscht?

It was either that or ask how you’re feeling,I type, and send it before I can think better of it.

The three dots appear. Stop. Appear again, and I watch them the way I have watched courtroom doors.

It’s a picture of the goldfish. Hairy, at the front of his tank, eye enormous against the glass, and positioned on the counter beside the tank, in frame, the open container of borscht, steam still visible. The composition is careful, staged, lit. The fish appears to be eyeing the soup with criminal intent.

I can hardly blame him.

The caption arrives two seconds later.He has demanded a portion. I’ve explained about sodium. Negotiations continue.

Such a silly message should not result in so much relief. But she still sounds like herself. This isn’t over, whatever this is.

I sit looking at a photograph of a goldfish menacing a container of my housekeeper’s soup, and I smile. Tell him the recipe survived three governments and one famine. He can appreciate it from a distance.

Darya returns and reports nothing, which I can appreciate. Luna’s secrets, whatever they may be, are hers to share. The visit was not surveillance, and she will not convert it into surveillance after the fact.

“She fed me a cracker with cheese. Treated me as a guest, in her own shop, mid-crisis. Good girl. Tired eyes.” A pause, her hand still on the coat hook. “Whatever it is, it is hers right now. Wait to be invited.”

Darya has given me direct orders perhaps four times. I have obeyed all four. Such a record argues for obeying the fifth.

Every problem I have ever owned, I solved by entering the room, invited or not. And here is one door, that I could open with a phone call or a knock or the full weight of everything I am, but the only correct play is to stand outside it and wait.

I hate waiting.

Friday, she texts first, unprompted.The wholesale order is dead, long live the wholesale order. Also the borscht was unreasonable. Tell Darya she fights dirty.

I will tell her no such thing,I reply.She would consider it a performance review and ask for it in writing, alongside a bump in pay.

A laugh emoji. Then,Soon. I just need a little more time. Okay?

It is not okay. But she needs it to be okay, and I have the overwhelming urge to make things okay for Luna.

Of course,I type instead.Take the time you need. The fish has my number.

And I put the phone face-up on the desk where I can see it, and go back to the slow work of taking a man apart. All the while across town, a woman I’m no longer pretending to care about takes whatever time she is taking, uninvaded, with good bread and life-altering soup in the shop and a sentry in the tank.

15

LUNA

The drive takes forty minutes,and I do all of it on muscle memory, every turn pre-loaded from thirty years of making it, which leaves my hands free to grip the wheel and my brain free to do the thing it does, which is everything, at once, in no order, with footnotes.

I have not told Ivan.

That’s the thing running across the bottom of every thought. I’ve had three weeks and a fish’s worth of confidences and an entire gallon of incredible borscht, and I still don’t have the courage to tell him.

But you can’t tell a man you’re pregnant when you don’t yet know what you want, because the second you say the words, they stop being yours, and I’ve watched my whole life what happens to women whose news becomes other people’s to manage.