Page 72 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

She takes a donut. She nibbles the edge.

Her eyes go wide, and every hinted line fades. “I have never,” she says slowly, almost orgasmically, “tasted anything this good in my entire life.”

“Why is that?” Cherry asks, pulling up a stool.

First, Olga finishes the donut. She reaches for a second. “My father had plans for me. A daughter is a negotiation. A thin daughter is a better negotiation.”

I stare at her. “What?”

“I have been very mindful of my food for a long time.” She bites into the second donut. “But perhaps a few spare pounds is not such a bad thing.”

Cherry looks at her with the expression she reserves for people she has decided are her business, whether they know it yet or not. “Honey, you’re fine as hell and twice as hot. Have a third. You will remain exactly as fine. You have that metabolism the rest of us want.” She says it with such authority that it lands as an established fact. “I can tell.”

Olga beams. It is a real beam, unguarded, the face of someone who has not been told something like that in a while and doesn’t know what to do with it except feel it. She reaches for a third donut to save for after her second.

Cherry looks at me over Olga’s head and tips her chin toward the back room with the expression of someone who has something to say and isn’t saying it here.

“I need to check some inventory,” I say. “Cherry, can you?—”

“Yep,” Cherry says, already moving.

In the back room, among the boxes of raw materials and the shelf of work-in-progress batches and the vanilla cardamom candles I still need to label, I turn to Cherry and say, “Is any of that true? The metabolism thing? How can you even tell?”

Cherry looks at me with infinite patience. “I was lying my ass off.”

“Cherry.”

“She’ll look good with some weight on her, the poor thing. Did you see her face?” She starts pulling boxes. “Where are the vanilla cardamom ones? She likes those. We should send her home with one.”

“Second shelf, left side.” I find the box. “You just told her?—”

“I told her what she needed to hear. She’ll be fine. Her bone structure could survive a hundred donuts.” Cherry takes the candle and inspects it. “This one smells incredible.”

“Thank you, I’ve been working on that pour temperature.”

We stand in the back room among the wax and the wicks and the lingering sweetness of vanilla and cardamom, and I think about Olga out front eating her third donut with the focus of a woman discovering something late that she should have had all along.

And I laugh. It’s been a while. Cherry grins at me, and it is the best I have felt in days.

The day is productive, to say the least. It’s nice to know I can be productive when my insides are ripped out. Seems like good preparation for motherhood.

I close the shop at seven. Olga has gone home with the candle and a list of content ideas she typed out before she left, andanother donut. Hairy has done his evening laps, circling with his usual conviction that the bowl is larger than it is. The day has that pleasant wrung-out feeling that comes from having done something real in it—the good tired, the kind that means the hours were worth something.

I turn off the back lights and lock the register and say goodbye to Hairy through the glass, the way I always do, then I head toward the train. Another day marked off the calendar, another day without Ivan.

So, it’s been good and bad.

The alley between the shop and the laundromat next door is one I cut through because it saves me three minutes, and I’ve cut through it a every day for years. I know the smells, where to walk to avoid slipping, all of it. Can’t take it in winter—the muck gets frozen over, and it’s way too slippery everywhere.

The vanilla wax has been a little rosy on the top end, and I’m not sure if that’s due to my pregnancy or if it’s real. I’ll have to check in with Mike tomorrow. His hormones never betray his nose. I hope Olga will want to come to the press interview. I have no idea how to do one of those.

I’m so thoroughly inside my own head that I don’t really notice the two men in the alley until I’m already deep in it and they’re there. No big deal. I pass people here sometimes. Just meet their eyes, and they know you’re watching them as much as they’re watching you.

There’s a third man leaning against the wall ahead. He is in bad shape. That is the first thing I register even in the shadows. Not the size of the men near me, not the dark, but him.

His face is a geography of damage, nose clearly broken, one eye swollen most of the way shut, the posture of a man who is hurting and furious about it. He looks like he lost a fight very badly, and the fury in his one good eye is the kind that is looking for somewhere to put itself.

Everything in me stops. Goes cold. I don’t run. There is nowhere to run to. I passed those other two men, and now, I feel them behind me. See their shadows, long and lean on the ground by my feet.