Page 45 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

I stand over him for a moment. The warehouse is absolutely still.

Then I step back. Armin is already there with a rag, white and folded, and I take it and clean my hands without looking down at what I’m cleaning off. Doesn’t matter.

My audience will not forget today.

I grunt to Armin, “Get the doctor. I want him to be able to answer questions tomorrow.”

“Already arranged,” Armin says.

I hand him back the rag. I roll my sleeves down, button the cuffs, and walk out.

The restaurant is on the eastern edge of the city, past the freight yards, tucked between a laundromat and a tire shop in a strip of storefronts that doesn’t ask questions. Mexican. I’ve never been here before.

That’s why I chose it.

I sit in a corner booth with my back to the wall, and I order in a voice that comes out quieter than I intend because the restaurant is smaller than I expected.

I order too much. I know I’m ordering too much—three platters, rice, beans, something with mole that the woman at the table describes with her hands more than her words—and I order it anyway because I know what a hard adrenaline crash feels like from the inside, and the only thing that fixes it is volume.

My body will want it eventually. It just doesn’t want it yet. The food comes. I look at it.

The smell is good. Warm and dark and layered with something that might be chili and char and the sweetness of caramelized onion, and under any other circumstances, I would already be eating.

But my gut is sealed shut. The fight sits in me like a stone. Jaba’s face when he said you were never going to move me up. The certainty in it. The years of it.

I have known Jaba since he was a boy. I put him in the room where decisions were made. I put money in his pocket and weight behind his name. And he looked at Witte’s courier and that was all it took for him to betray me. I had raised him up, and it counted for nothing.

This isn’t the first time a man has betrayed me. It’ll happen again. That’s the nature of my life. Never knowing who will be the next. Always wondering who thinks they aren’t getting their due.

The food goes cold. I sit with my hands flat on the table. The thing that walked into the warehouse tonight and walked back out again is not the thing that happily sits across from Luna and talks about borscht.

It is the other version of me. The one she does not know yet. The one I wish her to never know.

She would be afraid of me now. If she saw what happened. If she knew.

Luna looks at me like I’m a man, and that’s the most disorienting thing anyone has done to me in recent memory.

I don’t understand it. But she always has. Ever since we met. When I dragged her into that coat closet like a beast, she saw the man underneath. Didn’t even flinch.

She would flinch today.

My gut moves. Slightly, but it moves.

I think about her at my kitchen table, talking to Darya about bread like a woman who has no idea what’s underneath the apartment she’s sitting in. The absolute absence of performance in it. Just a woman who liked a bakery and wanted to talk about it.

I pick up a fork. The food is cold, and I eat it anyway, slowly at first, then less slowly, working through the first platter in the silence of a restaurant that has politely decided not to look at me. The stone in my gut breaks up incrementally with each bite.

Even cold, it’s delicious.

Maybe that’s the way Luna thinks of me.

17

LUNA

Olga Witte-Dumas walksinto my shop on a Tuesday morning.

She’s smaller in person with no wedding dress on. Less polished than before, too, no makeup, a good coat worn wrong, the belt knotted instead of buckled. The look of a woman who dressed at speed for an errand she rehearsed and dreaded.