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I whimper, trying to get myself under control. “I love the pictures, but I opened the envelope and saw— Has she always looked this sick? How did I not notice?”
“Because we see the best in the people we love.” He kisses my forehead. “Because you’re a good daughter who loves her mother.”
My chin wobbles, and I bury the next words against his neck. “She’s never going to get better.”
I hold my breath for empty platitudes and hollow words of comfort, but Arsen just holds me tighter. “It’s not fair. You don’t deserve this. Neither does Marie. But death doesn’t discriminate. It comes for us all.”
I blink and his face comes into sharp focus. “How did you survive it?”
Arsen loved his parents, and he lost them both just a few weeks apart. I don’t think I’d survive something like that.
“Denial,” he answers. “Bitterness. A fuckton of anger.”
I squeeze him back, hoping he feels even an ounce of the comfort I feel. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not lying to me.”
“It’s going to hurt when she’s gone,” he warns, cupping my face and tilting my eyes to his. “But you’ll have me to help you through it.”
Taking a deep breath, I rest my head against his chest, sadness rolling off me in waves. His presence doesn’t make everything better.
But it helps.
And that’s enough.
54
ARSEN
“Oh my God!” Laila white-knuckles the door handle and screams. I pump the brakes, already scanning the road and the sidewalk for danger, when she turns to me. “I forgot to tell Polina that Bugsy is in the laundry room.”
“For fuck’s sake, Laila.” I relax back into the seat with a sigh. “I thought something was wrong.”
She’s too busy fumbling inside her purse to care that I almost rear-ended the poor bastard in front of us. “Somethingiswrong. Nina isn’t going to go to sleep if she doesn’t have Bugsy.”
“Nina didn’t need that damned beetle to fall asleep last night.”
“He’s a ladybug, not a beetle,” she snaps, as though I’ve committed some egregious sin. “And that was because you were there to rock her to sleep. Tonight, neither of us is there. She’s all alone.”
My attention is strained between the road, Laila frantically searching for her phone, and the tantalizing cleavage I can see beneath the neckline of her sexy little black dress. But if I wanteven a slim chance of seeing more of what’s beneath that dress, I need to solve the crisis at hand.
“She’s not alone.Polina and Marie are with her.”
“But—”
“Dominik and Kira are also spending the night. I wanted all hands on deck because I foresaw this exact scenario.”
“Which scenario is that?”
“The one where you call off the night early because you can’t stand to be away from Nina for even a few hours.” She opens her mouth to argue, but I continue on. “I get it. Really. It’s not easy for me to leave her, either.”
“Is that why you ripped me out of the house and almost tossed me into the passenger seat? You seemed excited enough to me.”
“Only after I saw you in that dress.” I don’t miss the blush dusting its way across her cheekbones. “Did I tell you how ravishing you look in it?”
She fiddles with her neckline, trying—for fuck knows what reason—to pull it up a little higher. “You don’t think it’s too much? I’ve been whipping out boobs for nursing for so long that I don’t know how to gauge how much exposure is too much.”
