Page 84 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Give her time,” Darya says. “Let her find her feet. She has been through something. Let her come back to herself all the way before you ask her to take on something new, even something good.”

“How long?”

“As long as it takes. She’ll know when she is ready. And you will know when she knows. You are not as oblivious as you pretend to be.”

“And in the meantime?”

She looks at the jacket pocket where the box is. “It’s stone. It will keep.”

I pick up my coffee. I look at the box sitting on the table between us. “It’s burning a hole in my pocket.”

She almost smiles, which for Darya is a full smile, and I know the difference. “Better your pocket than her heart.”

She is right about that. I’m not in a hurry. The urgency that has been running through everything for the past several days has gone somewhere. What is left is something quieter. Something that can wait.

The pendant will keep. She is here, in my apartment, in my bed, safe. She said she wanted to face it together. She said it clearly, on solid ground, without anything forcing her hand except her own decision, and that means everything, and that is enough.

If she needs to rescind that decision, so be it. I won’t guilt her into my life with a pretty necklace. The rest can wait until she is ready, and I will be here when she is.

Darya puts a plate in front of me without being asked—eggs, bread, sliced cucumber, same as always, the food she feeds me when she has decided I need feeding and does not ask permission.

I eat it. The kitchen is warm. The radio plays something low. From the bedroom, nothing but silence, which is the sound of Luna sleeping peacefully in my bed.

It is the best silence I have heard in a very long time.

35

LUNA

I callCherry the second I’m steady enough to hold a phone without my hands shaking.

“I’m okay,” I blurt before she can say anything else, because I know Cherry and I know the first ten seconds of any call after radio silence with her are going to be a wall of panic if I don’t get ahead of it. “I’m safe. I’m okay. I’ll explain everything later.”

“Luna.” Her voice does the thing it does when she’s holding herself together by force. “Where have you been? I called the police. I called the hospitals. I was about to call your sister, and you know I hate calling your sister.”

“I know. I’m so sorry. I’m okay, I promise.” Better tell Ivan about her call to the police.

“You have to tell me everything.”

“I will,” I say, and I mean it the way you mean a thing you already know is going to be a lie. I’m not going to tell Cherry everything. Not the basement, not the chair, not the Walking Bruise or his switchblade, not any of it.

Telling Cherry everything means putting Cherry inside the blast radius of my life in a way I’m never going to do to her or anyone I care about who doesn’t already know the score.

I’m going to tell Hairy everything. Hairy can handle it. Hairy has seen things, worse things, probably, in the great cosmic sense of things. He will absorb it with his usual unbothered laps and never repeat a word of it to anyone, which makes him the single most trustworthy creature in my life right now.

Ivan is a close second.

This is what loving him is going to cost, I think, lying in his bed with my phone against my ear and Cherry’s worry pouring through it. Not violence—I’m choosing not to dwell on the part where violence is also occasionally on the table. If I dwell on that, I will not get out of this bed today.

The cost I’m actually sitting with right now is smaller and quieter than that. It’s a version of honesty that has to be managed and portioned out, the truth available only to those who can survive it.

I’m going to lie to my best friend’s face for the rest of my life, in small ways, about the things that matter most, and I’m going to have to get good at it. Cherry will never know about basements or switchblades or men with broken faces who deal in fear as a kind of currency.

She will know that I love a man whose work she’ll never fully understand and that I’m happy. She’ll decide that’s enough, because that’s the kind of friend she is. I’ll let her decide, because the alternative is dragging her somewhere she never signed up for.

It doesn’t feel like a choice, though. That’s the strange part. I lie here turning this over—the cost of it, the weight of it—and what I keep arriving at is that loving Ivan feels like the most natural thing I’ve ever done. More natural than anything else in a life that’s mostly been improvised. If the toll is some white lies to the people I love most, so be it. I have paid worse tolls for worse things.

“I promise,” I tell Cherry again. “I’ll tell you everything. Soon.”