Page 74 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

She’s not going to respond. I know this. She told me to go, and she’s had days to decide how she feels about that. Apparently,she’s not going to respond to a text about her fish. Which is reasonable. Which I understand. Which does not make it easier to look at the quarterly numbers.

Armin comes in at two with the supplier update.

I say three words that are not the right three words, and he stops talking and looks at me. I only notice because of the silence. “I’m fine,” I say, before he can say whatever he is going to say.

“You snapped at Petrov this morning.”

“Petrov was being slow.”

“Petrov is always slow. You’ve never snapped at him before. He has a condition. You have never been cruel about it.”

I look at the window. I look back at Armin. “I apologize for snapping at you.”

“You didn’t snap at me.”

“I’m apologizing preemptively.”

Armin is quiet for a moment, the way he is when he is deciding how much to push. “When did you last take a vacation?”

“I don’t take vacations.”

“Hence the need for one. Or several.”

“I’m fine, Armin. I’m dealing with an unforeseen distraction. It will resolve itself.”

He looks at me with the expression he keeps for things he disagrees with and has decided not to argue about, then takes the supplier update and goes.

I look at the closed door for a moment. Then I pick up my phone to try her again. There is a text from Hugo.

I look at it for a long moment. Three words, which for Hugo is either a threat or a confession, and threats from Hugo currently have nowhere to go, so I open it.

I fucked up.

I read it twice. I put the phone down. I pick it up.

In all my years of knowing Hugo Dumas, I have never received anything from him that could be reasonably described as an apology. Not when he was seventeen and broke my father’s watch. Not when he was twenty-six and tried to cut me out of the Lakeview deal. Not once, in all of it.

The closest I have ever gotten is a certain silence that means he knows he was wrong and has decided not to address it.

I send back,Call me.

He calls in two minutes. There is a long pause after I pick up, and I let it sit, because I’m curious which version of Hugo is on the other end of it. The pause ends.

“Ivan.” Stiff. Careful. Like a man who has rehearsed this and is already off-script.

“Hugo.” Another pause. I let that sit too.

“I don’t know where to start,” he says.

“I do,” I say. “Bratislava.”

He breathes out. He knows what I mean.

I go through it—not quickly, not cruelly, but completely. Bratislava. Geneva. Witte’s courier. Jaba. The route change that cost me a contact I had spent four years cultivating. The account in his mother’s name. Luna’s window. Decades of rudeness to me. Every item, in order, stated plainly. “… You can begin with any of them. Take your pick.”

“I know,” he says. “I know all of it. I’m sorry, Ivan.”

The words nearly take the breath out of my lungs. At first, I’m not sure what to say to him.