Page 71 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

How do I fill that hole?There is no spackle, no cement, nothing but Luna who will fit inside a Luna-shaped hole.

But she is afraid of what I am. She’s right to be careful, and I knew she was right even when I was standing in her kitchen saying the thing that ended it. I went home knowing I had been honest, and that honesty was not the same as right. I’ve been sitting with that knowledge for days while I kept myself busy with Hugo, Pyotr, and the list.

She said I lied to her, and I did, after a fashion. The reason I gave was true—she is too soft for the parts of my life that require what they require. My world is not hers. I cannot fix that.

I sit with my phone in my hand and the text on the screen and the gold light going off the buildings outside my window, and I think about a woman in a candle shop who named her fish Hairy and meant it seriously, who told me her fish was perceptive. The memory leaves a tightness in my chest my cardiologist would order an analysis for.

I don’t respond to her text. It was four days ago. The window for that reply closed the night I walked down her stairs, and responding now would be something I’m doing for myself, not for her, which is not a good enough reason.

I put the phone down.

Once again, I have no idea what to do with my hands.

29

LUNA

Three weeks ago,I would not have predicted that the most productive creative partnership of my professional life would be with a Russian mob wife who color-codes her content calendars and has opinions about serif fonts. And yet here we are.

Olga sits across from me at the worktable with her laptop open and her reading glasses on—small wire-framed ones that make her look like a very elegant professor—and she’s pulling engagement metrics with the focused energy of a woman who has found something to do with herself and is not letting go of it.

The shop’s social media has doubled in reach in three weeks. There’s a local press piece coming: a lifestyle column that wants to do a feature on independent women-owned businesses. Olga handled the pitch personally and did so well. I would not have thought to pitch it at all.

I’m better at the candles. She’s better at the world, knowing about the candles. It works.

“The lavender and smoke is getting the most saves,” she says, without looking up. “We should do a behind-the-scenes on theprocess. People want to watch things being made. It’s very soothing for them.”

“I can do that. Hairy will probably photo-bomb it.”

She looks up. Looks at Hairy in his bowl on the shelf. Looks back at me. “The fish is an asset. He has a face.”

“He has a face,” I agree.

I look at her bent over the laptop, pushing the reading glasses up her nose with one finger, and I think about how none of this was planned—not Olga, not the press piece, not the fact that I now know she takes oat milk in her coffee and cries at nature documentaries and learned four languages because her father said she would need them to be useful to a husband.

None of it was planned and almost all of it is good, and I’m trying to hold onto the good things these days with both hands because the list of good things has a gap in it the size of a large, quiet man who has not texted me in days, and I’m not going to think about that right now.

I’m not going to think about that right now.

“I can’t pay you for this,” I say, because I have been meaning to say it and keep putting it off. “I want to. I’m working on what that looks like. But right now the shop doesn’t have the margin, and I don’t want you to think I’m?—”

“Luna.” Olga closes the laptop partway. “I told you. I’m a lady of leisure. I’m bored as fuck. Please let me do this for you.” She says it with the directness of someone who has decided to be direct and is finding it liberating. “Let me make up for some of Hugo’s bullshit.”

“That’s not your debt.”

“We’re married. His debt is my debt.” She opens the laptop again. “And more than that—I want to. I really do.” She pauses. “Please.”

I look at her for a moment. She’s looking at the screen, but her shoulders are doing the thing they do when she is hoping I will say yes.

“Okay,” I say. “But what kind of coffee do you want? I’m buying.”

I would suggest donuts, but I’ve offered three times, and she has declined three times with the polite but firm energy of a woman who has spent her whole life declining food. I’ve decided to stop pushing and wait for her to get there on her own schedule. Some things can’t be rushed.

The bell above the door saves me from having to decide on the coffee, because Cherry comes through it like a weather event.

She has two coffees in a carrier and a white paper bag swinging from her wrist, and she drops both on the worktable. “I was in the neighborhood,” she says, which is something Cherry says when she was not, in fact, in the neighborhood, but decided to be. She looks at Olga. “Eat, woman. You’ll feel better.”

Olga looks at the bag. She looks at Cherry, who is looking back at her with the energy of a force of nature that has decided you are going to do something and is waiting for you to catch up. Olga has been uncomfortable around Cherry since the first time they met, in the way people are when they’re not used to people who take up that much space without apology. She reaches into the bag with the air of someone who has decided that resistance is more effort than it’s worth.