Page 47 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

It’s a person who just discovered the foundation of her marriage has a fault line running straight through it, and who came to the one witness who could confirm or deny, and chose, bravely, stupidly, to hear the confirming.

“I believe you, Olga.” I watch the relief and the horror arrive in her face at the same moment, because being believed means it’s real now.

I had expected, if I ever met his wife, to feel the old acid. The urge to deliver one clean line and watch it strike home.

But I cannot imagine kicking her while she’s down, and doing it for no good reason.

Instead, I feel something closer to recognition. Two women were living with the same handsome lie, and only one of us got told, and it wasn’t the one wearing his ring.

We sit for a minute. I don’t fill the silence.

Olga’s hands have stopped shaking. She turns one of the dropper bottles a slow quarter rotation on the table, not reading the label, just needing somewhere to put her fingers. “I should go. I’m so sorry. For the intrusion. For all of it.”

“I wasn’t the only person Hugo lied to. Consider that the next time he tells you something important.”

She swallows. “Oh, I will.” She stands, steadier than she sat, and pauses, and looks at the candle wall the way you look at a placeyou expected to hate and don’t. “It smells wonderful in here. I didn’t expect that. I don’t know what I expected.”

“Bergamot and bad decisions?”

A surprise, small wet laugh out of her, the first crack of something other than misery. She looks startled by her own laugh, the way you do when grief lets go of you for one second, and you’d forgotten the rest of your face still worked.

Then she leaves, the bell going off bright and ordinary behind her, out into a Tuesday that has rearranged her entire life and barely dented mine on the surface, and not at all underneath, where everything already lives.

Never did I think today would start with me feeling badly for the other woman.

Cherry comes out from the back about thirty seconds later, drying her hands on a rag she doesn’t need to dry them on, which means she heard most of it, which means she gave me the room on purpose, the way she does. Cherry’s timing is never an accident. “Well,” she says, leaning on the counter. “That was the wife.”

“That was the wife,” I agree.

“You okay?”

I pick the wick trimmer back up. “The strange part, the part I’ll turn over for days, is that I didn’t mind. I expected to mind. The woman walks in wearing the life that was supposed to be the knife in my back, and what I felt across that little table wasn’t triumph and wasn’t acid. It was the urge to make sure she got home okay.”

Cherry smiles. “That’s the funny thing about perspective, isn’t it? You never know which way you’ll land on old enemies or new friends.”

“Truthfully? I have no idea. Maybe it’s perspective. Or maybe it’s pity. Hugo lied to her just as much as me. More, even. He started their whole marriage on a fat lie.”

And Cherry, who knows when an answer is complete, just nods. “That man should burn.”

A raspy chuckle escapes me. “I donotenvy whatever the universe sends his way. It’s going to be a doozy.”

18

IVAN

Pyotr Witte is sixty-three,compact, silver-haired, and arrives in my office on a Thursday morning with the studied casualness of a man who has spent decades making the powerful feel they invited him.

His family started in machine parts in Minsk, moved into defense contracts in Chicago when the money pointed that direction, which for the Wittes is sufficient ethics.

He didn’t wait for an invitation. He called Armin two days ago and asked for a meeting. I respect that he didn’t wait for my invitation. An eager man is one I can work with instead of against.

He comes alone, which is either trust or theater. Once seated, he doesn’t mince words. “I’ll be direct, as I do not wish to waste your time,” he says. “I made an investment in the wrong Fedorov. I knew it before news of Jaba’s condition reached me, but that settled the question.”

“I didn’t realize you were looking to settle the question, Pyotr. I could’ve done that for you without the trouble of a big wedding.”

He doesn’t look embarrassed. “I’m here to discuss terms of being useful to each other, rather than continuing to be a nuisance. No sense in enmity when we could both profit.”

“I don’t want your weapons contracts,” I tell him, because opening with what I won’t take is the fastest way past posturing. “I don’t want an alliance that puts me crosswise with existing relationships.”