Page 56 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

His jaw works once. His voice is dark like shattered black glass. “Where is she?”

I know why he’s asking, and I have never in my life felt so completely held and also so completely certain of what I’m going to say. “No. I don’t want that.”

He looks at me. The cold, flat place is still there.

“I mean it. I want you to hear me mean it.” I put my hand on his chest, over his heart. “There’s no revenge to be had here. No justice. You get me?”

He grits his jaw. “Fine.”

“Star is in Austin. She’s a successful lawyer with perfect hair and a cold, empty apartment. She has money, she has a career, and she also has no one. No Marty. No Fred and Gerty. No Hairy, no Cherry, no Mike. No you.”

I feel his breathing slow a degree. “Go on.”

“She called the warmest people in her life embarrassing and blocked the rest, and she’s going to be very impressive and very lonely for a very long time. That, Ivan, is my justice. That is already the worst thing I can think of, and I thought of it the day I stopped being afraid of her.”

His chest is moving under my hand, steady now, the cold flat place doing something more complicated than withdrawing. Processing. It’s one of the things I love about him, even when processing requires me to wait.

I can wait. I’ve learned from him that waiting is a form of respect.

He finally looks at me and nods. “You pity her.”

“I do. Completely. She took so much from me. The worst thing I can do to her is refuse to hate her and keep building a life so full she’ll never understand it.”

“I won’t interfere. I won’t seek her out. By your grace.”

“Thank you,” I say, and mean it all the way down.

He’s quiet for a long time. Long enough that I think we’re done, long enough that his hand starts moving again, the idle tracing, but slower now, more deliberate, covering the streak from end to end in long passes. “You are a better person than I am.”

“I’m a different person than you are,” I correct, gently. “In this one respect, I had more practice. It’s not a competition, and even if it were, you didn’t get the same raw materials to work with. Different starting conditions, different outcomes. Basic math.”

I kiss him, because his hands have gone from the streak to my face, cradling it in a way that says everything.

“The streak,” he says, after a moment, his mouth against my temple, right at the edge of it, the exact border where white meets black. “It does get seen first. You’re right about that. It has since the coat closet.”

“It’s funny. I was so taken aback by you in the closet that I didn’t have a chance to be scared.”

“Taken aback?”

“Startled. Surprised. Whatever. You were this huge stranger who snatched me up. I should have been way more scared than I was, and if I knew I’d end up here, I would have been.”

He frowns deeply. “What does that mean, exactly?”

I snuggle closer. “Had I known I would have ended up open and honest and vulnerable in your bed, I would have been way more scared of you. But I wouldn’t have done anything differently, either.”

He smiles at that. “Neither would I.”

22

IVAN

Fourteen voicemails.

I listen to them in sequence, once, with my coffee going cold on the desk. Hugo’s voice moves through its full register over the course of the fourteen—indignant, then loud, then ugly, and finally, the ugly that comes when a man has been drinking, running out of the social muscle that keeps it managed.

He says Luna’s name in a way I do not like. He says my name in several ways I find more interesting.

By the end he has arrived at threats, which tells me everything I need to know about where Hugo Dumas’s head is—which is exactly where I wanted it. I delete all fourteen, finish my coffee, and sit for a moment with the satisfaction of a man whose work is producing exactly the results he designed it to produce.