Page 46 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

Cherry’s in the back doing the reorder. Mike is at the front window, reorganizing the new display for the third time this morning because he finished the reorder early and got bored, gourds migrating left, then right, then left again. He glances up, friendly, ready to greet. But I catch his eye and give him the small headshake that means I’ve got this one. He drifts back to his pumpkins with a flicker of confusion he doesn’t pursue, because pursuing things is not Mike’s department.

So, it’s just us. The candle wall, the warm light, the woman who slept with my ex when he was my current, standing in the middle of my life on a morning when I have exactly zero spare capacity to spend on her.

I’m days into the hardest math of my life, still dodging a man I’m not ready to talk to. Holding a secret with a heartbeat.

It had felt green yesterday. A good idea. Fun, even.

But this morning, I woke up to morning sickness—I think—and a head full of doubt. I don’t have room on the shelf for Hugo’s child bride. The shelf is full. The shelf is overflowing into the aisles.

And yet she’s here, and her hands are shaking, and I’ve never in my life been able to look away from someone who’s about to come apart. It’s a defect. Cherry calls it my one exploitable flaw, even though I have several.

“You’re Luna Ambrose,” she says. Her voice is cultured and careful and currently held together with tape. “I know this is, I know I shouldn’t, I didn’t know how else to do this. I needed to ask you something, and I needed to ask you, not someone else.”

What is she rambling about?

“Okay.” I set down the wick I’m trimming, square it on the counter, give her my whole attention, because half-attention is a lie. “Ask.”

“You and my husband.” She stops. Restarts, lower. “You and Hugo. You were together. Before me.”

“I was.”

“While he and I were—I’ve been going through some things, dates, mostly, I’m good with dates, and there are these months that don’t line up right, that can’t both be true unless—” She presses her lips together. Her brow lines faintly. She steels herself. “Were you together? He and you? While he was already seeing me?”

My god. She has no idea.

I could lie. I could soften it, manage it for her, hand her a version that lets her keep the floor she’s standing on.

But that’s not what she needs. She isn’t here for a pretty lie.

I look at her shaking hands and her wrong belt, and I think about every person who ever handed me the soft version to manage my reaction instead of telling me the truth, and how much I hated it, the feeling of being handled instead of helped.

“Yes. He started seeing you while we were still together. We were together for a little over three years. I didn’t know about you until you were engaged.” I keep my voice level, no heat in it, because the heat isn’t hers to absorb. “I don’t know what he told you about the timeline between us. But he used you to cheat on me.”

Olga sits down hard. Like the strength went out of her legs in front of the nearest Make-Your-Own table. Both hands flat on the table, the deliberate movements of a woman whose legs have just informed her they’re going off shift. She stares at the little tray of scent oils we keep out for customers, the dropper bottles, the blending spoons, and she doesn’t see any of it.

Her eyes won’t focus right now. Too bleary from tears that threaten to spill over.

Maybe it’s foolish, but I want to help her.

I come around the counter. I don’t know what I’m going to do until I’m doing it, which is to pull out the chair across from her and sit, because you don’t leave a person alone at a table when the floor’s gone out from under them, even if that person is technically the woman the universe assigned to be your nemesis.

Mike, at the window, has gone very gentle with the pumpkins, the way he goes when he senses a shift he can’t name. He won’t come over. He’ll just be quietly nearby, in case nearby is needed. It’s his whole genius, being the right amount of nearby.

She looks up. Her eyes are wet, and her mascara isn’t running because she isn’t wearing any, and that small fact, that she came here bare-faced, undefended, breaks something open in my read of her.

Maybe she isn’t the vapid socialite I thought she was.

“I didn’t know,” she says, as her voice wobbles. “I need you to know I didn’t know. About you. He told me you’d ended things, that it was long over, that you were—he had a word for you. It wasn’t a kind word.”

“I can guess the word.”Loony. He said it the times he was irritated by my weirdness.

“And I believed him, because he was handsome and my father approved, and that’s what I was raised to do, believe the handsome man my father approved of.” Her breath catches. “I helped him hurt you, and I didn’t even know. I’ve been sick about it for a week. I keep thinking, she was a real person, the whole time, with a shop and a life, and I was the other woman, and nobody told me I’d auditioned for the part.”

Well, damn. I believe her. Completely. There is no performance in this. She’s bare-faced and rambling, with eyes building up to tears that don’t fall yet. Either she’s the best actress on the planet, or she’s telling the truth.

And what would she have to gain from a lie? She doesn’t know me. Coming here to lie in person would just be weird.

I have spent my whole life reading people across this counter. It’s the actual skill of running a business, the one that tells me whether the woman wants oak moss scent or wants to talk. What’s sitting across from me is not a rival or a schemer or a rich girl slumming in my grief.