Page 88 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“You and Olga?—”

“Remains to be seen.” A pause, and something in his voice that wasn’t there before, something closer to hope than he usually allows himself. “I’m working on it.”

I’m still at the window, still thinking about all of it, when I hear her voice from the bedroom. Sleepy. Unguarded. Saying my name like it’s the most natural thing in the world to want, which, from her, lately, it apparently is.

I go to her.

She has shifted onto her side, pillows arranged the way she likes them now—one between her knees, one supporting her stomach, the arrangement she’s worked out over the past weeks through trial and complaint and several increasingly detailedinstructions to me about pillow placement that I have followed without comment because they work. She reaches for me without fully opening her eyes, and I get into bed beside her, and she pulls me close with unselfconscious ease.

When she whispers, “I want you inside me,” I could lose it right then.

This time, I move with her rather than against her, watching her face, adjusting when she shifts, and she keeps her eyes mostly closed and makes small, contented sounds against the pillow that tell me everything I need to know. It’s unhurried in the way the morning can be unhurried—no urgency, just warmth, closeness, and the quiet satisfaction of two people who know exactly how to be good to each other now.

When she breaks on me, I lose myself in her. Every sound, smell, touch, taste.

Luna unravels me, and I never knew I needed a good unravelling.

EPILOGUE

LUNA

Margot Ambrose Fedorovsleeps in her bassinet beside our bed. And at two in the morning, she wakes me to let me know she’s ready to eat, and there is no negotiating with her about timing.

I’m three weeks postpartum and operating on the kind of exhaustion that’s stopped registering as exhaustion and started feeling like a permanent condition of being alive. I feed her in the rocking chair we set up in the corner, and she eats with the same total focus she brings to everything. I watch her tiny fierce face in the dim light from the hallway and feel the ache of loving something this much.

It's not a metaphor. It is a literal ache, somewhere behind my ribs, every single time.

She was named for no one. We talked about it for months—Ivan’s mother’s name, my mother’s name, some combination that would honor someone—and in the end, we looked at her in the hospital, hours old, already looking like she had a whole personality we had no input on. We both knew at the same time that she wasn’t going to be anyone’s tribute.

She was going to be entirely herself, starting immediately. Margot. Just Margot, with our names trailing behind her like something she’s carrying rather than something that defines her.

She finishes eating. Margot has decided that two in the morning is a reasonable time to be briefly, intensely awake, gripping my finger with a strength that seems disproportionate to her overall size, studying my face like she’s trying to memorize it.

I burp her. I change her. I walk her around the bedroom while she does the thing where she stares at a point past my shoulder, and then, gradually, her eyes get heavier, and her grip on my finger loosens.

Eventually, she settles. I put her back in the bassinet. She makes one small sound of protest and then nothing. I stand over her for a long moment just watching her breathe. The small rise and fall of her chest, the occasional twitch of a hand, the complete unguarded trust of a creature who has no idea yet that the world contains anything but the people who love her.

I do this more than is probably necessary. I cannot seem to stop.

I’m wide awake now, the kind of wide-awake a body gets that has been interrupted and has no intention of going gracefully back to sleep, so I go to the kitchen for water.

Ivan’s already there.

He’s standing at the counter in the dark, in pajama pants and nothing else, the baby monitor in one hand and a glass of water in the other, watching the audio display on the monitor like it might reveal something new if he looks at it long enough. The little bars of green light pulse with the ambient sound of the room.

“She’s fine.”

“I know.” He doesn’t put the monitor down.

This is the thing about Ivan Fedorov that nobody who knew him nine months ago would have predicted. Everybody who knows him now finds it completely unsurprising. He’s been meticulous about fatherhood in a way that borders on the operatic.

He read—I counted, because I found the stack on his nightstand and could not resist counting—four dozen books on infant development, attachment theory, sleep training philosophies he then debated with himself out loud in our kitchen, and the history of swaddling techniques across different cultures, which I did not know was a category of book that existed until I found one in his stack with a Post-it flagging page sixty-three.

He asked our doctor questions in the third trimester that made her blink, then laugh, then answer them seriously, because that’s the only response available to Ivan’s questions—you either laugh or you answer them, and usually both.

And then there was the hospital. Margot was forty minutes old when they finally put her in his arms, and the room had a hush to it that I will remember for the rest of my life. The nurse stepping back, the machines beeping their ordinary rhythms, and Ivan looking down at this small, furious, red-faced demon like she had just rearranged the entire architecture of his existence without asking permission first.

I watched a man who had broken bones with his bare hands, who had burned down a building, who runs an organization built in no small part on fear, hold seven pounds of infant like she was the single most important object that had ever existed.