Page 42 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“Right.” I nearly tumble over my own feet when I try to stand on my way to her bathroom. There, I find a hand towel that is not going to be used for hands.

She’s asleep before I return. I stay awake for a while, cleaning her up first before I allow the relaxation to seep in. Once it does, it drags me under the weight of my last thoughts.

The piers, Alexei, my son at the wrong table.

Tomorrow’s problems do not get to haunt me tonight. Tonight, I kiss her nape birthmark and find solace in the press of her body.

17

THEA

I wake up before I’ve been asleep an hour. There’s an ache settling into my wrists. My body is one deep satisfied throb.

Telling Maxim to lose control was the best idea I’ve had in a while.

But now, my head wants control. It’s just going. The invoices on the floor. Whether Pasha or anyone else heard the headboard. Klaus’s mislabeled folders. The tie, and the way it felt when he tied me with it. What it means that the scariest man I know knocked on my door like an upset teenager, and what it means that I let him in.

That I wanted him to come in and be with me and tell me his problems.

Not that we talked much.

His heartbeat is slow and even under my ear. Mine is running a full staff meeting levels. I hold still. Deer-quiet. Maybe if I don’t move, my brain will run out of tabs.

“You’re awake⁠—”

I startle in his arms, but they close in around me. Some stupid part of my brain likes that.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“You didn’t. I wasn’t—I was awake. My brain doesn’t have a well-developed off switch. It has a dimmer, and the dimmer’s on the fritz.”

His fingers start moving through my hair, slow. For a while that’s all. Soon, it’s all that matters. I’m nearly yawning from his simple touch.

And then, out of the blue, he says, “Her name was Irina.”

“Who?”

“Niklaus’s mother. We were twenty when we met. She threw a snowball at the back of my head because, she claimed to her dying day, I looked too serious for a boy my age.” A breath moves through him, almost a laugh, worn smooth from time’s erosion. The pain in his voice is the tired kind, there but without structure, like a ruined mansion with half a roof and missing walls. “We were married at twenty-two. Niklaus came shortly after.”

“And then?” Soft as I can make it.

“A pain in her side turned out to be ovarian. There was a year of hospitals, and then there were no more hospitals because they couldn’t do anything for her. There was no enemy, no bullet or poison. Nothing I could pay or fight. A cell divides wrong, and the world ends, and the doctors apologize.”

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say, and he doesn’t need my nothing dressed up as something.

“Klaus was ten. He had her laugh. Her exact laugh. I would hear it from another room, and my heart would soar for a breath, then stop working entirely.” His hand stills in my hair. “My grief wasn’t… not the dignified quiet of a sad man. It was the kind that comes out of the hands. That needed a target. And there was a boy in my house with her laugh, and I was afraid.”

“Of hurting him?”

“I couldn’t imagine doing that, and yet, I was terrified of it. Of what I was becoming in that house, living with her ghost. Of him growing up watching it, learning it, thinking that is what a man does with pain…” A slight shudder in his breath says it all.

“So, you sent him away.”

“Boarding schools. The best ones, Switzerland, then Choate. Summers with Galina here. Holidays and birthdays, we managed dinners in restaurants with elaborate gifts.” Regret coats his every word. “I told myself it was protection. Distance from the business, distance from me.”

“And every year the distance got easier to maintain.”

“And harder to cross. By the time I trusted myself again, my son was a stranger who flinched into a smile whenever I entered a room.” The ceiling gets his next words, not me. “Everything he is, I built. The vanity, the hunger to be seen, the performing instead of working. A boy nobody watches learns to make people watch.”