Page 66 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

She’s good at this. She’s good at a lot of things I don’t think she gets enough credit for, including the hard work of making people feel less alone in a bad moment. It’s a skill I’ve never had and have never needed until recently.

I look at the two of them. They’re upset the way people are when something that matters to them has been damaged, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing useful I can do about their distress.

I’m a man who has never in his adult life not known what to do next, but now, I’m standing in a candle shop holding a broom and I don’t know what to do with my hands.

This is new. I don’t enjoy it.

It is not the kind of thing I’m known for. But I’ve been in enough rooms after enough hard things to know that sometimes the only move available is a small, warm, useless one, and that those moves matter more than they should.

I go next door, which is a diner that has been open since six, and I come back ten minutes later with two boxes of donuts anda carrier of four coffees. Luna looks at me when I come back through the door. Her employees look at me. I set everything on the counter next to the quarter, which I then pocket it without comment.

“Oh,” the young woman with the paint-stained jacket says, in a voice that is still wet around the edges. “That’s a good idea.”

“Eat something,” I say, my voice tinged with awkwardness.

The young woman with the paint-stained jacket takes a donut and says thank you in a voice that is still working its way back to steady. I nod at her and feel, obscurely, like I have done one right thing in a morning that has required several things of me I was not fully equipped for.

Luna watches me do all of this with an expression I cannot fully read, which is unusual—I’ve gotten reasonably good at reading her, and she has gotten reasonably comfortable letting me.

There is too much in front of me right now—broken glass, her employees, the quarter in my pocket doing things to my blood pressure I would rather not sit with—to sort through an expression. Later.

I stay long enough to be sure the display is going to be righted, the window is going to be measured for replacement, and the employees have their assignments and something to eat. Then I catch Luna’s eye across the shop.

She’s standing in the middle of her damaged inventory with a coffee in her hand and her employees around her, and the morning light coming through the empty window frame at an angle that makes the remaining glass on the floor glitter. She looks at me with those green eyes and gives me a small nod. It feels like permission.

I go.

Helplessness is an itchy, ill-fitting suit. I wore it for forty-five minutes in that shop and I’m done with it. I intend to take it off in the most efficient way I know.

Hugo has answered my question. He did not choose option A or option B. He chose a third option that was not on the table, which tells me what he thinks of my terms and what he thinks of me. A miscalculation that belongs entirely to him and which I intend to correct.

Luna asked me not to retaliate if this was personal. I told her okay, and I meant it. And I mean it still.

This is not retaliation. This is consequence, and consequence is something else entirely. The difference matters to me even if it wouldn’t matter to most people I know.

He wants to play it this way?

Fine. We’ll play.

27

LUNA

He knocks at nine-thirty,looking like shit. I know before I open the door that something happened, because Ivan does not knock at nine-thirty, so seeing him like this, throws me.

Normally, Ivan calls first or sends a text that says he’s coming over. The knock without preamble means something went sideways, and when I open the door and see his hands, I understand what.

I don’t say anything. I step back and let him in.

The knuckles on his right hand are split in two places, already darkening around the edges, the kind of damage that is not accidental.

I don’t know if that’s better or worse. “Kitchen.”

He follows me. I pull the first aid kit from under the bathroom sink and bring it to the table. He puts his hand on the table between us like he’s setting something down he’s been carrying too long. There’s a slight thud with the motion.

I sit across from him and open the kit and get to work.

He lets me. That’s the thing about Ivan that keeps surprising me—he lets me do things for him, this enormous man who has spent his entire adult life being the one who handles things. He sits there in my kitchen chair and lets me clean his hand like it’s the most natural thing in the world.