Page 49 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I knew, somewhere underneath the hurt, that there were two completely different things happening at once, and that neither of us had said either of them out loud yet. He was pulling back to protect me from something, the way he'd always protected people, quietly, unilaterally, deciding on my behalf what I could handle before I ever got a vote. And I was reading every inch of that distance as the opening scene of a much older story, the one where a person you loved got smaller and smaller in the doorway until one day they just weren't standing there at all. Both things could be true, and apparently both were, happening in the same relationship at the same time, without either of us having the words yet to say so plainly. I didn't have those words sitting alone in my office at nine at night. I only had the cold feeling, and a spreadsheet I wasn't reading.

I was still turning it over when Naomi let herself into my office without knocking, the way she always did, balancing a lopsided centerpiece in both hands like a woman defusing a bomb that also happened to be full of ranunculus.

"Do not," she said, before I'd even looked up, "ask me why there are seventeen stems in a vase built for twelve. I don't have an answer. I have regrets."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"You were absolutely going to ask. It's on your face." She set the vase down on my desk with the exaggerated care of a woman who had already dropped it once tonight and was not planning on a repeat performance. "This is for the Kessler wedding. The florist swears it'll look intentional once it's on the table. I am choosing to trust her, mostly because it is nine at night and I have no other options."

"It might look intentional."

"It looks like the flowers are trying to escape, single file, toward freedom." She yanked a stem loose with the focused violence of a woman who had made peace with collateral damage. "The bride also just texted me asking if we can add a dove release. At her indoor venue. I have spent the last twenty minutes trying to explain, gently, why that is a bird tragedy and not a wedding moment, and I am not confident I've won." She jabbed the offending stem back into the vase at a slightly different angle, squinted at it, and yanked it right back out again. "This is the job. Flowers and doves and men who cannot commit to a headcount. Nobody warns you about the doves."

She started pulling stems in earnest then, frowning at each one like it had personally wronged her, and it took her exactly four more seconds to look up and actually see me. "Okay. What's wrong with your face?"

"Nothing's wrong with my face."

"Cora."

"I'm working."

"You're staring at a spreadsheet you haven't scrolled in ten minutes. I've been in here watching you not scroll it. That's not working, that's brooding with a laptop open for cover." She kept pulling stems, somehow not even slowing down, multitasking her way through both the centerpiece and my emotional state with equal focus. "Talk. I can fix flowers and listen at the same time. It's basically my whole skill set."

"It's Dmitri."

"Shocking absolutely no one. What did he do?"

"That's the thing. Nothing. He didn't do anything." I closed the laptop, because Naomi was right, and there was no version of that spreadsheet I was actually reading. "Calls got shorter this week. Texts got shorter and later. He canceled dinner tonight, and the excuse was thin enough that even he seemed to know it was thin, and when I asked if everything was okay he said fine, and Naomi, I have never believed a man who answers a real question with fine."

"Did you ask him what fine meant?"

"I asked. He said work things. Nothing you need to worry about." I heard myself say it out loud and heard exactly how it landed a second time. "Which is somehow worse than if he'd just told me it was bad."

"Because you'd rather know the actual size of the problem than get handed a vague reassurance shaped like a problem."

"Yes. Exactly that." I dropped my head back against my chair. "I told him I wanted the whole truth, even the bad parts, especially the bad parts. That was the deal. And now I'm sitting here wondering if the deal already has an asterisk on it three weeks in."

Naomi set down the stem she was holding, which for Naomi was the equivalent of a full dramatic pause, complete with sound effects. "Can I say something you're not going to love?"

"When has that ever stopped you?"

"He runs an organization where people get hurt when information leaks to the wrong ears. If something's actually wrong right now, tonight, this week, there is a real chance it is not about you at all. It might be about keeping you safe from whatever it is." She picked the stem back up, resumed her surgery on the centerpiece, entirely unbothered by having just said something enormous while holding a ranunculus. "That doesn't mean the distance doesn't hurt. It's allowed to hurt and also not be about you leaving him. Both things are true sometimes. Annoyingly."

"I know that logically."

"Logically isn't where this lives, though, is it?"

"No." I picked at a loose thread on my sleeve, watching her work instead of looking at her directly, because it was easier to say the next part to a lopsided centerpiece than to my best friend's face. "My dad didn't announce he was leaving. He just got quieter first. Shorter calls. Shorter visits. And then one day the calls stopped being short, they stopped being anything, and I spent about a year waiting for him to come back before I understood that quiet was the whole sentence, not the beginning of one."

"Dmitri is not your father."

"I know that too. Logically."

"Say the sentence again, but this time actually believe the word logically while you're saying it." Naomi looked up, and whatever teasing had been in her voice a second earlier was gone entirely. "Cora. He built you an entire garden of trust over months, brick by brick, admittedly weird bratva bricks, but real ones. One quiet week doesn't undo that. You're allowed to feel the fear. You are not required to treat the fear like a verified fact."

"When did you get so wise? You're currently holding a flower hostage."

"I'm full of surprises. Also I've watched you do this exact spiral before, with smaller stakes, and I already know how it ends if nobody interrupts it. You go quiet, you get efficient, you build yourself a very tidy little fortress out of tasks, and three weeks later I find out you've been handling an entire emotional crisis solo because asking for help felt like one more risk you weren't willing to take." She finally got the centerpiece into something resembling a shape a human being might have chosen on purpose, and held it up for inspection. "Better?"