Page 64 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Best kind.”

Mike brings the vision together on his third attempt, and Cherry calls it acceptable, which means she loves it. Olga texts at three with a preliminary deck attached.

Somewhere in the city, a man is at a desk with a baby book in his drawer. In Berwyn, Marty is cleaning the risotto pot. My goldfish is doing laps. And in Austin, a severe woman in a perfect office is missing everything good in life.

I hope that one day, my child will know her aunt. The likelihood is that Aunt will be Cherry Darling. Her grandparents will be my uncle’s throuple. Her first pet? Hairy.

It’s already a good life. It’s going to be even better when my daughter gets here.

26

IVAN

Her nameon my phone at seven in the morning is not unusual. Her voice when I answer is.

Luna doesn’t panic. I’ve seen her receive news that would have unraveled most people, and she has met it with insane steadiness. So, when I hear the controlled quality in her voice—not calm, controlled, which is different, which is what calm looks like when it is being held together by force—I’m already reaching for my jacket before she finishes the sentence.

“Someone broke into my shop,” she says.

“Are you there now?”

“Just arrived.”

“Stay outside until I get there.”

“Ivan—”

“Luna. Outside! Now!”

But then her tone shifts as she squeaks, “Hairy!”

“Luna!” I shout. “The fish is fine!”

“They could have hurt him?—”

“Please, Luna! No one is going to hurt your fish! Please wait for me!”

Her gasps break over and over. “Okay.”

I’m there in eleven minutes, and I park badly and don’t care and run the last half-block because the closer I get, the more I see the full picture before she sees me seeing it. She’s standing on the sidewalk in front of the shop with her arms crossed, her jaw set, and her green eyes moving over the damage, with the expression of a person taking inventory because inventory is something to do, and something to do is better than nothing.

The front window is gone. Not cracked—gone, the glass spread across the sidewalk and into the shop in a scatter that caught the early light and threw it everywhere.

Through the empty frame, I can see the interior. Shelves pulled, product on the floor, the handmade display she’d shown me photographs of with the quiet pride of someone who doesn’t admit to quiet pride knocked sideways off its base.

I stand next to her and look at it. There are no words for how angry I am. “Let me go check on Hairy first, okay?”

She nods, tears in her eyes.

I step over the broken window into the shop, gun in hand. I check every possible hiding spot—that’s how some of these guys do it. Wait until you’re distracted from the damage, then grab their target. But there’s no one in here. Then, I check the fish.

I shout, “Hairy’s okay! You can come in now!”

She joins me, racing to Hairy’s bowl, where he swims back and forth. “Okay, little man. I can breathe again.” Then, she spies the devastation around us. “Don’t say anything reassuring,” she says, without looking at me.

“I wasn’t going to.”

She nods once. We stand there for a moment in the kind of silence that doesn’t need filling, and in that silence I’m doing several things at once—cataloguing the damage, estimating cost, and managing something in my chest that has no practical value but is present regardless.