Page 76 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Hey, I still wear the hell out of a suit. Broken face or not.”

We say goodbye and hang up, and I sit with the phone in my hand and the quiet in my office. There are long roads and people who arrive at things late. Is late better than never? I don’t know.

I text Luna.I’d like to talk. When you’re ready.

I watch the screen for longer than I’m going to admit. No response. No read receipt. Nothing.

I put the phone down and pick it up twice more in the following hour and get the same result, which is what I got this morning and what I have been getting for days, and I’m running out of interpretations that don’t arrive at the same place.

She’s not ready. Or she’s ready, and the answer is still no.

Luna opens the shop. I’ll be there at fifteen after with coffee, and I will not text first because texting has gotten me nothing, and showing up is the one move I haven’t tried.

She can tell me to go when I get there. She can send me away. That is her right, and I will respect it. But I’m going first. She can decide what to do with me when I get there.

It is, at minimum, a plan.

31

LUNA

He comes back.

I don’t know how long I’ve been down here. It’s been hours, at least. Maybe a day. Long enough for the fear to move through its first stage and into something else. Not sure what exactly. Cold in the base of my stomach, but organized. Manageable?

Or I’m just nuts.

I’ve been sitting on the floor with my back against the concrete wall because the floor is the only option besides the stairs, and the stairs are where the men come down. I don’t want to be any closer to them than I have to be. The wall is better than nothing.

I have been doing what I do when I’m frightened, which is make lists. What I know: one door, one bulb, no windows, no phone.

What I don’t know: where I am, how far from the shop, how long I’ve been here.

What I have: my keys, which they didn’t take, and which are useless for a locked door but are better than nothing, if I need to jab an eye out, and that the Walking Bruise is connectedto Ivan, which means Ivan will eventually know something is wrong, which means I have to stay alive and functional until that happens.

I’m not crying. I notice this about myself with something that’s not quite pride but is adjacent to it—I’m sitting on a concrete floor in a basement with no phone and a locked door, and I’m making a list instead of crying. That’s either resilience or dissociation, and tonight I’m choosing to call it resilience.

I’m still making the list when the door opens.

He comes down the stairs with the careful movement of a man whose body is hurting him, which gives me a small, mean satisfaction that I don’t show on my face.

In the light from the single bulb, he looks worse than he did in the alley. He brings a chair from somewhere. A folding one, metal, the kind that belongs in a church hall or a school cafeteria, which is such a mundane detail of a kidnapping that my brain automatically notes it as new information to cling to.

He sets it in front of me and sits in it backward, arms crossed over the top, looking down at where I’m sitting on the floor like he arranged the geography on purpose. He probably did. Men like him usually do. Briefly, I wonder whether he plans to beat me with the chair.

“Jaba,” he says, like he’s introducing himself at a dinner party. “In case you were wondering.”

“Luna. But you already know that.”

“Ivan’s woman.” He says it like it tastes like something bad.

“Ivan’s ex. Like I told you.”

“You’re carrying his child.”

“That doesn’t make us together. People have children without being together all the time.”

He waves this off. “He’ll come for you. Men like Ivan always come for their things.”