Page 78 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

I think about Hairy doing his laps in the shop, slow and unbothered and completely unaware that anything has happened, which is the correct way to be a fish. Cherry will feed him. I know it.

And then, there’s Ivan. His text this morning—yesterday morning? The one I didn’t answer, the ones before it that I didn’t answer, and the accumulating weight of all that silence that felt like a boundary I was holding. Now, it feels like a waste of time I didn’t know I didn’t have.

What would I say if I could answer him right now? I know what I would say. I’m going to be furious at myself for all those unanswered texts if I get out of here, which I’m going to do, because the alternative is not something I’m willing to consider.

I press my back against the wall. I pull my knees to my chest. My cheek throbs. I breathe slowly and start making my list againfrom the beginning, because the list is what I have. I’m going to use everything I have, and I have more than Jaba thinks I do.

One door. One bulb. No windows. No phone. One metal chair.

Jaba. Armin. The organization. A man who does not know Ivan as well as he thinks he does.

A baby that needs me to get out of here.

32

IVAN

The shop isdark at ten-fifteen.

I stand on the sidewalk with two coffees, look at the dark, and understand immediately that something is wrong. Luna’s shop is not dark at ten-fifteen.

Luna’s shop has been open at ten every morning since she signed the lease. The lights are off. The sign is not flipped. Hairy is doing his laps in the dark.

I wait.

At ten-thirty-five, Cherry comes around the corner with the energy of someone who is expecting to find a thing and is already confused that they haven’t found it yet. She walks like she owns the street, and I recognize her from the break-in.

She stops when she sees me. She looks at the dark shop. She looks back at me. “Where is she,” Cherry says. Not a question. An accounting.

“I don’t know. Has she ever been late?”

Cherry looks at me with an expression that answers the question before she does. “Never. She’s here like clockwork.” She pulls out her phone. “I’ve been calling since nine.”

I hand her one of the coffees because I’m holding two and have no use for both of them now. “I will check the apartment and call you the moment I know anything.”

“Yeah, okay. Thanks.” She parts to open the shop, and I leave before she can ask me what I think happened, because what I think happened is not a thing I want to say out loud yet.

Was Hugo’s apology call a ruse?

If it was, he’s a dead man walking.

Luna’s apartment is empty. I know before I get the super to open it—the silence of a space where no one has been recently. The absence of the small sounds a person makes just by existing in a place. I walk through it anyway.

Kitchen: her coffee cup, clean, on the drying rack. Bathroom: tidy. No residual water droplets at the bath or sink. Bedroom: bed made, her jacket on the chair, her phone charger still plugged in on the nightstand. No phone.

I call Armin from the sidewalk outside her building. I tell him what I need. Her bank accounts, any activity since yesterday. Every camera within three blocks of the shop and four blocks of the apartment. Anyone he can reach at the transit authority. All of it, as fast as it can be done.

“How long?”

“An hour,” Armin says. “Maybe less, if we are very lucky.”

I go back to the apartment because it is her space, and it’s where the answers are most likely to come from. Also, I cannot stand on the sidewalk for an hour without doing something that will draw attention.

I walk the rooms. Stand in her kitchen and look at the coffee cup on the drying rack and the magnet on her fridge that says something irreverent about mornings and the small, framed photograph on the counter of her, Cherry, and a woman I don’t recognize, all three of them laughing at something outside the frame.

I will end Hugo. This has his fingerprints all over it. Has to be him.

I have pictured killing him many times over the years, and I will take a sample of all the methods and torture him. Call in my doctor to patch him up. Then do it again.