Page 83 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

I look at it for a long time. When I turn the box slightly and watch the opal catch the light differently, my breath catches in my throat. Blue, then green, then something that is neither, the colors moving the way they move in her hair when she walks under good light, the streak finding angles you hadn’t noticed before.

It's absolutely perfect. It’s her, and Gregor has put all of that into a piece of jewelry without ever having met her and without my being able to articulate it properly. I’m going to send him something significant for this. A car. A house. Something good. I close the box.

From the bedroom, there’s nothing. Luna is still asleep, which she needs. She’s going to sleep as long as she wants to sleep. I’ll allow no disturbances.

The problem is that I know what I want to do with it. I know what I felt when I came in with the tea and found her sitting up screaming in my sheets, the sound of it moving through me in a way that made my stomach hurt.

I’m in love with Luna Ambrose.

I have been in love with her for longer than I knew consciously, and the pendant in the box is the shape of that love rendered in black diamond and opal. I want to give it to her, but the timing is wrong.

There is a bruise on her cheek, still fresh. The tea I made her sits on the nightstand. The shape of what she has been through is still very present in this apartment.

The timing is entirely wrong, and I know it. But I’m standing in my entry hall anyway with a box in my hand like a man who did not think past the getting-her-back part.

Maybe I didn’t. Because getting her back was the only thing I was thinking about since I knew she was gone, and now that she’s back, I have to think past it.

I still don’t understand what Jaba was thinking. What his plan was. To our knowledge, he never sent out communications regarding Luna. No one’s admitting to receiving a text from him, and we’ve checked his devices.

No message was sent out since he acquired her.

Which means… what exactly? Keep her until he got her plenty dehydrated, then send pictures? When she spoke a little last night, she said the bruise was from him backhanding her when she pissed him off. It’s not like he was actively torturing her—it was a reaction, not a planned assault.

There are too many questions I may never have the answers to.

Maybe he wanted to keep her for an extended period to drive me mad before he made his move. Maybe he simply enjoyed her company. I will never know.

But Luna is exhausted, bruised, and running on the aftermath of something that would have broken most people. I don’t want the first time I tell her how I feel to be a thing she says yes to because she is grateful, or afraid, or not yet back in herself enough to know what she actually wants.

She deserves to say yes from solid ground. Or no from solid ground.

Whatever she chooses, I want her to choose it with her full self, not the version of herself that’s running on adrenaline and relief and the aftermath of a concrete floor. That version would say yes to almost anything right now, I know that, and I’m not going to let my love be a casualty of bad timing.

I put the box in my jacket pocket and go find Darya.

Darya is in the kitchen when I come through. She has something on the stove. There’s also something being chopped, and the radio is on low. She looks at me when I come in and then looks at me more carefully. “Coffee?”

“Da.” I pour myself coffee and sit at the table. Darya finishes what she’s chopping, rinses her hands, and says nothing. I say nothing too.

She has been different since last night. Gentler—not soft. Darya does not do soft exactly, but gentler. It’s the way a person gets when something has moved them, and they have not found a way to say it yet.

She put Luna to bed herself, sat with her for twenty minutes, and when she came out of the bedroom, her jaw was set, and her eyes were bright, and she said,“She is strong, that one,”in a voice that was not her usual voice.

I said,“I know.”We left it there.

“I have something.”

Darya turns from the stove. I take the box out of my pocket and set it on the table. She crosses to it, wipes her hands on a cloth, and opens it.

She looks at the pendant for a long time. She does not touch it. The opal catches the kitchen light and does its thing, and Darya watches it. “Gregor’s work.”

“Yes.”

She closes the box carefully, sets it back on the table between us, and looks at me. The expression on her face is not one I have often seen from her. It’s the closest thing to tender I’ve seen from Darya in all my years of knowing her. “It’s the right thing. The instinct was right.”

“The timing isn’t.”

She does not argue this, which means she agrees with me, which is both a relief and a kind of difficulty in its own right. There was a part of me that came to this kitchen hoping she would tell me I was wrong, because wrong would be simpler—wrong would mean I could go in there right now with the box.