Page 61 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

I’ve never met anyone who knew so clearly what they have.

The whiskey is still sitting where I left it. I look at it and don’t pick it up. I want something permanent with her. I’ve wanted it for long enough that the wanting has stopped surprising me and started simply being a fact of my life. The same way the city outside is a fact, the way the scar across my left hand is a fact.

It’s there. It’s not going anywhere.

The question is not whether I want it but what shape it takes, and that is the part I have no map for, because I’ve never been here before.

Every piece of knowledge I have accumulated in my life on the subject of women, what they want, and how to conduct myself has been accumulated in a context that doesn’t apply to this one.

I think about what I know about Luna and try to work from that instead.

She doesn’t want to be managed. She doesn’t want performance—she has a good eye for it and no patience for it, and I think she would find it insulting, which it would be, coming from me. I couldn’t do that anyway. It’s not who I am.

She wants to be seen. What she wants is someone who pays attention to the actual her, the texture of her, and responds to that rather than to some idea of her.

Luna Ambrose has earned that right.

And I want her to have something from me that she’d choose herself.

That’s the thought that surfaces, fully formed, from the circling. Not a declaration, not a gesture she’d have to figure out how to respond to, not something that would put her in a position she hasn’t asked to be in. Something that looks like it was always hers. Something she’d put on without thinking about it and then one day catch in the mirror and think, yes, that one.

I pick up my phone. I know exactly who to call.

This is, I recognize, the closest I have come in my adult life to doing something romantic.

Gregor answers on the second ring. He’s been my jeweler for twenty years. He made Darya’s necklace—the one with a garnet she’d mentioned admiring once in passing, in a store window, thinking no one was listening—two Christmases ago.

Darya has not taken it off since.

“Ivan,” he answers.

“I need something made.”

“This should be good. You have an interesting eye for these things.” The sound of him moving, a chair, something set down. “Tell me.”

“Something dark,” I say. “Stone or material, your call, but dark as the base. And through it, a streak of white. Pale against the dark. Like a vein running through it.”

Gregor is quiet for a moment in the way he is quiet when he is seeing something. “What piece?”

“Something she’d wear every day. Not a ring.” Not yet. “Something that looks like it found her, not like someone picked it out for her.”

“What is she like?”

“Dark hair, green eyes. She wears black almost exclusively, but not because she’s trying to—it’s just what she reaches for. She’d walk past something flashy without looking at it. The piece needs to be the thing you see on the second pass, not the first.”

“What does she do?”

“She makes candles. Runs her own shop.” I look out the window at the city. “She has a good eye. Better than most people I know who do this professionally.”

Gregor makes a sound that means he is already thinking, already somewhere inside the problem, turning it over. “Give me some time.”

“You have it.”

“And how is Darya doing? Still like the necklace?”

“She never takes it off.”

Gregor laughs. “Good. That’s the whole point.”