Page 55 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

She pauses. “It’s good you called me, Ivan. The colors…”

As she speaks, and I try to pay attention, I realize there’s not a man in my organization—not Armin, not a captain, not anyone who has ever sat across a table from me—who would believe Ivan Fedorov is planning a baby shower with his housekeeper.

By the end of the call, I picture it. Luna will walk into her own shop after hours and find it full of flowers and the people who love her, and she will not be able to object, because some things are simply true regardless of whether you were consulted—and one of them is that she completely deserves this.

I fully intend to make sure she has everything she’s ever wanted.

21

LUNA

We’re in bed,the lamp low, somewhere past ten, his hand tracing idle patterns over my arm, when he touches the white streak for the first time with intention.

He’s touched it before, but not in this way. Before it was incidental, passing, the back of a hand or a thumb in motion. Tonight, he touches it the way he touches everything that matters to him, slowly and on purpose, one finger tracing the edge where the white meets the black, from temple to hairline and back.

“Tell me about it. About what happened here.” His voice is soft.

I listen to my heart, taking stock of whether I want to tell it. I do. That’s new—not the wanting but the ease of it, the absence of the old calculation about what happens after.

I’ve told the story three times in my life. Once to Cherry, in my second year, late after closing. Once to Hugo, in the context of why Star’s name in a conversation made me go strange. He took it in, then mostly forgot it within the week, which told me a greatdeal about Hugo at the time and a great deal about the story itself.

It's brief, and it’s not dramatic the way the world expects scars to be dramatic. Hugo wanted drama. That was the only reason he ever committed something to memory—it amused him.

This is the third time.

“Star. My sister. She was ten when I was born, and she had the full attention of both our parents for a decade. I showed up and ruined everything. According to her.”

He waits, hand still.

“She never let me forget it. Not in a loud way—she wasn’t loud, she was precise. She knew which words to leave where so you’d step on them later, and she refreshed the supply whenever it ran low.”

Ivan says nothing. His hand doesn’t move.

“I spent years trying to get her to want me around. Dressed how she dressed, liked what she liked. Followed her around the house trying to be worth keeping.”

I stop, because even now there’s a small flinch in the telling, not pain exactly but the memory of a child who didn’t yet know that some people won’t choose you no matter how small you make yourself. “I was eight. She was eighteen. She had a curling iron heating on the bathroom counter.”

He’s so still.

“I don’t think she meant to hold it there as long as she did.” I pause. “I don’t know that she meant it to go that way. But she held it against my hairline and counted to twenty—maybe shedid mean to hold it there that long, come to think of it. But then, she let go, and that whole time, I didn’t scream because I had learned not to make noise when she was angry, because noise made it worse, and I didn’t want to know what the curling iron would feel like on my cheek. Or my eye…”

The facts arrive flat, sorted. “No hospital. My mother cleaned it, put something on it, told me Star had problems and I needed to be more careful around her.”

His voice barely registers. “She correctedyou?”

“Yeah.” I pause. “That was the sentence that did the real damage, honestly. Not the burn. The burn healed. The sentence stayed with me ever since. Putting the blame on me… on a little kid, for what was done to her by an adult. It didn’t feel right then, and it feels abusive now.”

The room is quiet for a while.

“I hated it for years. The scar, I mean. Kept it covered, changed my part, wore my hair specifically to hide it.”

He is still quiet. “You don’t anymore.”

I touch the streak myself, the old habit of checking it’s still there, still mine. “I was maybe twenty-one when I was in the mirror doing my hair, and I thought, she tried to mark me as hers, and instead she made me unmistakable. The streak exists because someone tried to change me. To hurt me. I exist because I survived it. So…” I shrug.

He nearly smiles. “You’re a survivor. I knew that when we met.”

“Now the scar goes first. I make it go first. It’s the first thing you remember about my face.”