Page 69 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

But he doesn’t.

I close the door. I stand with my hand on it for a moment, listening to his footsteps on the stairs, counting them down to the landing and then to the street door. Then I go back to the kitchen and sit in the chair he was sitting in.

It’s still warm. Or maybe that’s the fiery pit of hell I’m in. Could go either way.

I look at the first aid kit open on the table, and the small piece of gauze wrapper on the floor that I didn’t get around to throwing away. I knew, when I said it, that I might regret it. I knew it the way you know you’re making a decision you can’t unmake, that cold clarity that arrives too late to be useful and just early enough to make it hurt. I said it anyway.

Regret claws at my chest.

I’m not sure yet if that makes me brave or just frightened. Tonight it feels like both at once, which is the worst version, theone nobody warns you about. The one where you do the right thing, and it feels exactly like the wrong one.

My phone buzzes. Cherry.

How’d it go? Did Mike ruin the vibe?

I look at the message for a long time. The kitchen light is on, and the rest of the apartment is dark. I’m sitting in a chair that is no longer warm, in a kitchen that is entirely mine again, trying to figure out how to answer a question that would take an hour to answer honestly.

The vibe is pretty ruined.

I close the first aid kit, put it under the bathroom sink, and go to bed.

28

IVAN

Hugo did not callthe police.

I’ve been waiting for it. The call that doesn’t come is sometimes louder than the one that does, and this one has been loud for three days now, sitting in the back of my awareness while I worked through the rest of it.

Hugo Dumas is—was—the public face of the family’s legitimate holdings. The hotels, the casino, the manufacturing arm in Bridgeport. His name is on letterheads and donor lists and the kind of charitable foundation photographs that exist so a man can point to them later. People know his face.

The police would have loved a reason to sit across from me, and Hugo walking into a precinct with what I did to his nose would have been a gift they’d have unwrapped with both hands.

He hasn’t called.

I have checked, twice, through channels that would know before any official report was filed. Nothing. I have been turning this over and arriving at the same answer each time, which is thatHugo knows something I haven’t confirmed yet—that the call would cost him more than it would cost me.

There are things I know about his secondary accounts and his arrangements with Witte that would surface in the course of any investigation. A man who has spent three years skimming from an organization does not invite scrutiny even when scrutiny would wound the man he hates. The math is simple enough even for Hugo.

Hugo is protecting Hugo. That has to be it. It’s the most consistent thing about him, and it is the thing that will keep him alive and keep him quiet. I find I have made my peace with that outcome even if peace is a strong word for what I have made.

He’s left with Olga’s family money and nothing else. No role. No access. No seat at any table I set. His nose is broken in two places.

His face, which has always been the thing he led with, the thing he pointed at when he wanted to be believed, will heal imperfectly. He will need a nose job to fix it. If it can be fixed.

I feel no satisfaction about it. That’s the part that surprises me each time I reach for it and find it absent. I expected satisfaction, and what I have instead is a kind of flatness, like a ledger that has been closed.

Hugo Dumas is no longer a problem in any meaningful sense—he’s just a man who made choices and is now living inside them, which is a cage of his own construction.

I expected to feel more. I feel finished.

I go to see Pyotr Witte at his office in the Gold Coast, which is not where he conducts his real business but is where he conductsthe business of being seen conducting business—a distinction I understand well, having a few such rooms myself. He meets me at the door, and the handshake is warmer and held a beat longer. He has good coffee, and he pours it himself.

For a few minutes, we’re two men drinking coffee in a well-appointed room, a fiction we are both aware of and willing to maintain, because it is what makes the rest of it possible.

“The Hugo matter,” he says, when we are past the coffee portion.

“Resolved.”