Page 52 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“I could be wrong,” he says, with the face of a man who most definitely does not think he is wrong.

“I don’t have a name yet. Not for any gender. I’ll know it when I know it.”

“It would be nice to be consulted,” he says, which is Ivan for ‘I care about this and I’m asking nicely.’

I smirk in the darkness. “Noted.”

20

IVAN

The carI assign to Luna is a dark gray Volvo, unremarkable, rotated every three days. The man inside it is one of mine—young, patient, and good at being invisible.

I chose him myself. I don’t tell Luna about any of this because she didn’t ask and because asking would require a conversation I’m not ready to have yet. The last thing I want to talk about is the size of the gap between what I know is reasonable and what I’m actually doing.

Then I call Darya.

“The woman,” I say, when she picks up.

“Luna,” Darya says, with the weight she gives words when she wants me to hear that I’m being an idiot.

“She’s pregnant.”

A pause. Then, in a tone I have not heard from Darya in all the years she has told me what she thinks of my choices, “Thanks be to God.”

“I need you to send food. Regularly. She’s going to forget to eat.”

“How do you know she forgets to eat?”

“She gets absorbed in things. She loses track of time.” I have watched her do this. I have found her at ten in the evening, still working at her kitchen table on something, no dinner, no awareness that she has not eaten, genuinely surprised when I point it out. “Tuesday and Thursday to start. More if she’ll accept it.”

“She’ll accept it,” Darya says, with a certainty I find both reassuring and slightly alarming.

Darya begins sending food on Tuesday. By Thursday, she’d already amended the schedule to include Sunday, which Luna apparently not only accepted but requested. I learn this when Luna texts me a photograph of a container of Darya’s beet salad with the message,Your housekeeper is an angel, and I will not hear otherwise.

Her building is a different matter.

I pull the security assessment myself with the super’s schedule in hand and a penlight I don’t need because the hallways are well enough lit to reveal every problem without assistance. The list I come away with is not short.

One camera at the front entrance with a blind spot that covers the east stairwell entirely. A side door that requires a key card that apparently everyone in the building has lost and replaced so many times that the management company stopped tracking who has active credentials. The intercom buzzes anyone in if you wait long enough and press enough buttons, which I test twice to be sure.

I don’t tell Luna any of this. She doesn’t need to worry about such things. That’s my job. And well… I’m very good at my job.

By the following Wednesday, the camera has been repositioned and a second one added. The side door now requires a code that resets weekly, so the residents are notified by email. The intercom has been replaced with a system that requires the resident to actively approve entry from their phone.

I pay for all of it through a holding company and arrange for the building’s management to receive the invoice as an anonymous infrastructure grant, which is not a thing that exists but which they accept without question because the amount is right, and people will accept almost anything if the amount is right.

Luna texts me on Thursday to mention that her building got new security cameras and isn’t that something.

I look at this message for a moment and respond,Hm. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

She sends back a single raised eyebrow emoji. Then nothing else.

I put my phone down and go back to work, and I feel, distantly, that I’m going to have to get better at this if I intend to keep getting away with it.

The book I find at the back of a medical supply catalog—not the soft-cover kind with watercolor illustrations of sleeping infants, but the clinical one, the one written by an OB for other doctors, dense with terminology and trimester-by-trimester breakdowns of what is happening inside the human body when it is doing this. I have it sent to my office.

And I read it with the door closed.