Page 85 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

She makes me swear on Hairy’s life, which I do, with only a small twinge of guilt, and we hang up. I lie in Ivan’s bed for another minute before I get up.

When I come out into the main room, something is off with him. The careful way he’s standing near the window, the way his hands are doing something with each other that hands don’t usually do unless a person is managing them on purpose.

“Hugo called,” he says, before I can ask. “He apologized. To me. He wants to apologize to you and to Olga, though he’s going in reverse order—starting with the people he’s wronged most recently.”

Those might be the last words I ever expected to hear. “Hugo Dumas apologized to someone?”

“I was equally surprised.”

I file that away as something to think about later, because it’s a genuinely strange piece of news, but it’s not what’s bothering Ivan—and I can tell.

“Okay. But something else is going on with you. What’s up?”

He looks at me. He opens his mouth like he’s going to deny it, and I watch him decide against the denial. Instead he reachesinto his jacket pocket and takes out a small box and holds it out to me without a word.

I look at the box. I look at him. My hearing goes hollow for a minute before I find words again. “We don’t need to get married just because I’m pregnant, Ivan.”

“I know that.” His voice is steady. “Open it.”

It’s a pendant—a rich black jewel, dark and deep, the kind of stone that seems to be doing something even sitting motionless in a velvet box. Through it, a single streak of white opal. Pale against the dark. Catching the light from the window and throwing it back in soft shifting colors that move when I tilt the box, blues and greens that weren’t there a second ago.

I have made jewelry-adjacent things. I have a candle shop and an eye for beautiful objects, and I have never seen anything like this in my life.

All my breath leaves me at once.

“Can I put it on you?” he says.

I nod, because I don’t trust my voice yet, and I lift my hair off my neck, and he comes around behind me and I feel the cool weight of the stone settle against my chest and the clasp click shut, and when I look down at it, it sits exactly where it should, exactly how it should, like it has always been there and just hadn’t found me yet.

“Ivan.”

“I’m in love with you, Luna. I want you here,” he says. “Permanently. You, and the baby, and the fish.” A small pause. “Not because of the baby. Not because of what Jaba did. I have tried, these past several days, to build a version of my life thatdoesn’t have you in it. I cannot do it. I don’t want to do it. Move in with me. Or we can move somewhere you want to live. I don’t care as long as we’re together.”

I sit with that for a moment. I have spent a long time being someone who processes things quickly because no one was ever going to process them for me. I lost my parents young. I dropped out of college because the structure of it didn’t fit the shape of my brain, and I had Marty’s kitchen table to learn at instead. And now there’s this.

Someone offering to do all of that with me.

“I should tell you that I’m probably neurodivergent. Like, undiagnosed but probably. So, our kid might be too. And the fish is non-negotiable.”

“I had already worked that out about you,” Ivan says, with something that might be the start of a smile. “And Hairy has a standing place in my home. I’ve already spoken to Darya about tank placement.”

I laugh. It comes out of me before I can stop it, sudden and real, and something in my chest that has been held tight since the basement finally lets go all at once. “Okay. Yes. I’ll move in.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me for a second like he’s making sure he heard correctly, and then he crosses the space between us and kisses me.

We end up back in his bedroom, and the celebration that follows is thorough and unhurried and leaves the pendant the only thing either of us is wearing by the end of it.

The morning brings something else.

Olga’s piece runs in a Chicago lifestyle magazine, and it is good. It is better than good. There’s a photo of the shop window, the lavender and smoke display Olga insisted on restyling against my initial objections and was, infuriatingly, completely right about.

There’s a shot of my hands mid-pour that I don’t even remember someone taking, the wax catching the light in a way that makes the whole process look almost ceremonial, which I suppose it is, in its own small way.

The writer calls the shop“a small bright thing in a city that needs more of them,”which I read three times before I let myself believe it was about me.

When I call Cherry, she screams in a register I have never heard from her before, the kind of sound that doesn’t belong to words anymore, loud enough that Mike, somewhere on her end of the call, asks if everything’s okay in a voice that suggests he’s already halfway to the door and bringing the good first aid kit.

We close the shop early, which I have never done before, and which feels appropriately rebellious given the circumstances. We get drinks—mine virgin, because of the baby, but everyone else’s decidedly not—at the bar two doors down, the one with the good jukebox and the bartender who knows Cherry by name and by drink order.