Page 60 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

We work for two hours at the worktable, her notebook and my laptop, and the tea she brought is going cold. She has already thought through the color theory and has a full proposal for how scent families could be visualized consistently across digital and physical touchpoints.

She asks questions that are smart enough to be annoying and then sharp enough to earn their annoyance. Mike passes through twice and brings us crackers the second time without explanation, which is Mike’s version of saying,“I noticed you haven’t eaten, and I care about you.”

The strangeness of today tickles me. My ex’s child bride has come to help me to alleviate her guilt that she never earned. The poor thing didn’t do anything wrong, but here she is, helping.

Where’s Hugo in all of this?

I’m tempted to ask her about it, but I don’t want to sideline our conversation. I note the strangeness and find what I mostly feel is interested. The world has a sense of humor I didn’t appreciate when I was young and afraid of it.

“I want to be clear about something,” Olga says, when we’re wrapping up, stacking the papers into her perfectly organized file. “I’m not doing this strictly out of guilt. I do feel guilty, but guilt is not a sustainable business model, and I don’t think you’d want my work if that’s what it was funded by.”

“I wouldn’t,” I agree.

“I’m doing this because you’re interesting. And because Wax & Wane is interesting. And because—” she pauses, and this time, when the micro expression passes through her face, it stays long enough to name. It’s something just beginning to open, new light under a door she is still deciding whether to go through. “I’ve spent my whole life doing what I was raised to do, and I’m starting to want to do something I decided to do. This is the first thing. So, I’ll have a full proposal for you by Thursday. The naming frameworks and the seasonal calendar both.”

“That sounds amazing. And what is the fee for all this help?”

She rolls her eyes. “Like I need money.” She packs up and leaves, and that’s that, I guess.

Cherry materializes from somewhere in the shop—the back, the middle, possibly the air itself—with the timing of a woman who has been listening for exactly long enough. She walks Olga to the door, says something low I can’t hear, and I hear Olga laugh, a short, clean sound, genuinely surprised, the sound of someone who didn’t know they were about to find Cherry funny and then did. The bell. The door.

“Bored as fuck,” Cherry says, tilting her head in the direction of the door. “I’d trade places with her, if I could. Not the Hugo thing, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But that kind of money? Yeah, I could stand some boredom for that. She’s going to be trouble in the best possible way, and you need someone in your corner who tabs.”

“I have you.”

“Baby,” Cherry says, picking up the good tape gun from the counter and heading back toward boxes, “I’m the whole committee. She’s the one who does the filing.”

I don’t even know what that means, but I nod along as I watch her go. There’s something happening in this shop that I did not plan, a collection of people arriving around this counter who all somehow belong here. I don’t have a word for what it is except the right word, which is mine.

I take Hairy’s flakes from the counter and shake three into the water, and he drifts up to them with the serenity of a fish who has heard worse news and taken it in stride. He’s a professional. He can handle the full briefing. We’ll get to it after close.

“Hairy,” I say quietly. “Big day.”

He does one more lap for me. His sources are excellent. He already knew.

24

IVAN

The office isquiet at two in the morning—no phones, no Armin, no captains with problems that need solving before they become larger problems.

Just the city outside the window doing its nighttime thing and the glass of whiskey I poured an hour ago and have not touched, and a thought I have been circling for three weeks without landing on it cleanly.

I am,I acknowledge to myself in the quiet,entirely in trouble.

This isn’t a new thought. It has been arriving in pieces for months—first the coat closet, then the gala, then the morning she pulled me back into bed with one word and didn’t open her eyes to say it. But it’s landing differently tonight, fully assembled.

The trouble is that I’ve had arrangements. I’ve had women who understood the terms of my world, accepted them, and asked nothing I couldn’t deliver.

I have been good at that. I set the rules, knew what was wanted and what was off the table, and nobody was confused about whatwe were to each other. That’s a version of a relationship I’m competent at. I know its shape and its limits, and I’ve never once mistaken it for something it wasn’t.

But… Luna Ambrose is not that.

Her sister had traded the right things for the wrong ones. Luna has never made that trade, and she knows it.