Page 50 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Marginally. It still looks like it's plotting something."

"Everything I make after nine at night looks like it's plotting something. It's a signature style at this point." She set it down and actually looked at me, the joking mostly gone. "Call him. Not to interrogate him. Just to say you noticed the distance, and it scared you a little, and you'd rather hear that from him than build a theory out of silence. That's not needy. That's the deal you two apparently made. Use it."

I did call, once Naomi had gone, hauling her rescued centerpiece out the door with a warning that she would be back tomorrow to check whether I'd eaten anything besides coffee. Dmitri picked up on the second ring, his voice careful in a way that had become the whole week's theme.

"Hey," he said. "I only have a minute. I'm sorry about tonight."

"I know. I just wanted to hear your voice." I made myself say the actual thing instead of performing fine the way he apparently had been. "You've felt far away this week. I noticed. I'm not asking you to explain everything right now if you can't. I just needed you to know I noticed, so it doesn't turn into a thing neither of us said out loud."

There was a pause, longer than the sentence needed, the kind of pause that told me more than whatever he said next would. "I noticed it too. I'm sorry. There's something I'm handling, and I promise I'll tell you more once I actually know more instead of half a picture that would only frighten you for nothing."

"Is Sean okay?"

"Sean's fine. This isn't about him." There was another pause, and I could hear him deciding how much of the truth to hand me through a phone line at nine at night, weighing it the way I weighed a seating chart, careful, deliberate, aware that one wrong placement could ruin the whole table. "I have to go. I'll call you tomorrow. Properly, not four minutes squeezed between two other things."

"Okay."

"Cora."

"Yeah."

"I meant what I said in your apartment. All of it." He hung up before I could answer, which was so unlike him that I sat there staring at the phone for a full minute afterward, unsure whether I'd just been reassured or handed one more piece of a puzzle I didn't have enough pieces to solve yet.

The office was empty by then, the way it always was after nine, just me and the hum of the refrigerator down the hall and a stack of contracts I had already read twice. I thought about calling Naomi back, and decided against it, because she had already done her job tonight and I didn't want to make her do it twice in one evening. I thought about calling my mother, and decided against that too, for reasons that had less to do with tonight and more to do with a lifetime of not wanting to hand her one more thing to worry about.

What I actually wanted was to fix something, not him, not the fear, not the old wound with my father's name on it that had apparently been waiting all this time for a reason to reopen itself, but something smaller and more solvable, something with a deadline and a checklist and a version of done I could reach by morning. It was the same instinct that had built an entire company out of other people's chaos, the same one that alphabetized a spice rack nobody but me would ever judge, and I had stopped pretending years ago that it was a virtue instead of a very well-dressed defense mechanism. It worked, though. That was the maddening part. It always worked, right up until it didn't.

So I did what I always did instead. I pulled the Worst Case notebook out of my bag, flipped past the wedding disasters and the vendor nightmares and the one page near the back labeled BEST CASE that still made something in my chest go warm every time I saw it, and found a blank page.

"Fine," I told the notebook, out loud, alone in the office at midnight. "I'll just be excellent at this without him, then."

I wrote it down like a task.

26

DMITRI

The kitchen was too large for one person eating breakfast alone, though I had never noticed it in fifteen years of doing exactly that. It took only a few months of the alternative to ruin me for the comparison. Steam rose off the coffee Rosa had poured without asking whether I wanted it, and beyond the window the lake sat flat and gray under a sky that had not decided yet whether it planned to rain, and somewhere in the middle of that ordinary morning I found myself doing the thing I had been doing for a week now, listening for a voice that was not going to come out of any of the rooms behind me.

Rosa set a plate in front of me and did not walk away afterward. I noticed before either of us said a word.

"Eat," she said. "You are not eating. You are moving eggs from one side of the plate to the other like a boy hoping I will not notice."

"I noticed you noticing."

"Good. I am not subtle. I have never tried to be." She crossed back to the stove, where a second pan sat half full of eggs nobody was going to touch, and set it down harder than the pan required. "There has been enough food on this counter for two people all week. You keep eating like there is only one."

I looked at the empty place setting across from mine, the plate and the fork and the glass she put out every morning without being asked, the way she had put out two of everything since the first week Cora stayed here long enough for Rosa to notice a pattern and simply start cooking for it. Nobody had told her to stop. She had stopped anyway, the day the calls got short, and started again this morning like she was testing whether I would say something about it.

I did not say anything about it.

"You talked to her last night," Rosa said. It was not a question. "I could hear it through the wall. Not the words. The voice you use when you are being careful with someone."

"It was a short call."

"A call is not nothing. It's more than she got out of you the last three times." She pulled a loaf of bread toward her on the cutting board and began slicing it with the brisk confidence of a woman who had made this exact breakfast several thousand times and did not need to look at her own hands to do it. "Why isn't she here?"

"She's in New York. She has a business to run."