Page 70 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

He nods. He sets his cup down with the deliberateness of a man who has something to say and is deciding how to say it. “I want to reaffirm our agreement. What is his is not mine. I have no interest in your operations and no claim on what he told me.”

“I know.”

“You know, and you’re still sore about it.”

“Jaba was mine to handle. He wasn’t yours to cultivate.”

“Fair,” Pyotr says, without flinching. He sets his cup down. “I won’t insult you by arguing it. It was an opportunity, and I took it. You would have done the same.” He picks up his coffee again. “Hugo is a halfwit. You are better off with him at a distance.”

“We agree on that.”

“He thought proximity to you made him significant.” Pyotr turns his cup once in its saucer, a small rotation, considering. “Men like that are dangerous in a way that is hard to account for—not because they are capable, but because they are desperate. Desperation makes them unpredictable.”

“He is predictable enough now.”

Pyotr’s mouth moves. It is not quite a smile. “Yes. I imagine he is.” He pauses. “You would not happen to be looking for a young wife, would you?”

I look at him.

“I ask because I don’t have another daughter,” he says, before I can speak. “But Olga is less enchanted with Hugo these days. She may be single soon.”

“A widow?”

“We shall see.”

I sit with that for a moment. Hugo has earned whatever Pyotr’s patience eventually produces. I don’t dispute it, and his survival past this point is his own problem to manage. He has lied, cheated, stolen, and tricked his way into a situation that has no clean exit. I’m not required to find one for him.

And yet. “He’s still my stepbrother. In name only, and barely that. But in name. My family name carries weight. Not insults.”

Pyotr studies me. His expression doesn’t change, but something behind it shifts—the look of a man quietly revising his estimate of another and finding it higher than it was. “Noted.”

It is all he says on the matter. We finish the coffee and the meeting.

The drive back is long enough to be useful. I go through the remaining items in my head—the things that need doing now that Hugo is resolved and Pyotr is reaffirmed and the organization is running clean for the first time in months.

There’s a list. There’s always a list. I assign weight, sequence, and the names of the men who will handle each piece.

The list runs out somewhere on the expressway, and what’s left when it runs out is the quiet. I don’t like the quiet. Never have.

Tonight, the quiet is louder than the list was.

I miss her. She’s the channel I cannot change on the television of my mind. My favorite background noise. Lovely chaos.

There is a text on my phone from Luna from days ago.

I have read it before. I read it again.

Hairy is doing laps. I think he knows something happened. He’s very perceptive for a fish.

I look at it for a long time.

Four days ago, she was in her shop with her fish, and she was thinking about me, and she texted me about it the way she texts about everything—sideways, funny, with the ease of someone who assumes the other person is glad to hear from them.

And I was. I was glad. I read it at the time, standing in this same office, and felt the warmth of it land in the middle of whatever I was dealing with and stay there, the way things from Luna tend to stay.

I kept myself busy since things ended with her. Hugo, Pyotr, the organization, the list. All of it necessary. All of it, in the end, is beside the point.

There is a gap in the shape of things that was not there before Luna, and I know exactly what it is, and I don’t know what to do about it. She left a hole in my life.