35. Luna
LUNA
I call Cherry the second I’m steady enough to hold a phone without my hands shaking.
“I’m okay,” I blurt before she can say anything else, because I know Cherry and I know the first ten seconds of any call after radio silence with her are going to be a wall of panic if I don’t get ahead of it. “I’m safe. I’m okay. I’ll explain everything later.”
“Luna.” Her voice does the thing it does when she’s holding herself together by force. “Where have you been? I called the police. I called the hospitals. I was about to call your sister, and you know I hate calling your sister.”
“I know. I’m so sorry. I’m okay, I promise.” Better tell Ivan about her call to the police.
“You have to tell me everything.”
“I will,” I say, and I mean it the way you mean a thing you already know is going to be a lie. I’m not going to tell Cherry everything. Not the basement, not the chair, not the Walking Bruise or his switchblade, not any of it.
Telling Cherry everything means putting Cherry inside the blast radius of my life in a way I’m never going to do to her or anyone I care about who doesn’t already know the score.
I’m going to tell Hairy everything. Hairy can handle it.
Hairy has seen things, worse things, probably, in the great cosmic sense of things.
He will absorb it with his usual unbothered laps and never repeat a word of it to anyone, which makes him the single most trustworthy creature in my life right now.
Ivan is a close second.
This is what loving him is going to cost, I think, lying in his bed with my phone against my ear and Cherry’s worry pouring through it. Not violence—I’m choosing not to dwell on the part where violence is also occasionally on the table. If I dwell on that, I will not get out of this bed today.
The cost I’m actually sitting with right now is smaller and quieter than that. It’s a version of honesty that has to be managed and portioned out, the truth available only to those who can survive it.
I’m going to lie to my best friend’s face for the rest of my life, in small ways, about the things that matter most, and I’m going to have to get good at it. Cherry will never know about basements or switchblades or men with broken faces who deal in fear as a kind of currency.
She will know that I love a man whose work she’ll never fully understand and that I’m happy. She’ll decide that’s enough, because that’s the kind of friend she is. I’ll let her decide, because the alternative is dragging her somewhere she never signed up for.
It doesn’t feel like a choice, though. That’s the strange part.
I lie here turning this over—the cost of it, the weight of it—and what I keep arriving at is that loving Ivan feels like the most natural thing I’ve ever done.
More natural than anything else in a life that’s mostly been improvised.
If the toll is some white lies to the people I love most, so be it.
I have paid worse tolls for worse things.
“I promise,” I tell Cherry again. “I’ll tell you everything. Soon.”
She makes me swear on Hairy’s life, which I do, with only a small twinge of guilt, and we hang up. I lie in Ivan’s bed for another minute before I get up.
When I come out into the main room, something is off with him. The careful way he’s standing near the window, the way his hands are doing something with each other that hands don’t usually do unless a person is managing them on purpose.
“Hugo called,” he says, before I can ask. “He apologized. To me. He wants to apologize to you and to Olga, though he’s going in reverse order—starting with the people he’s wronged most recently.”
Those might be the last words I ever expected to hear. “Hugo Dumas apologized to someone?”
“I was equally surprised.”
I file that away as something to think about later, because it’s a genuinely strange piece of news, but it’s not what’s bothering Ivan—and I can tell.
“Okay. But something else is going on with you. What’s up?”
He looks at me. He opens his mouth like he’s going to deny it, and I watch him decide against the denial. Instead he reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a small box and holds it out to me without a word.
I look at the box. I look at him. My hearing goes hollow for a minute before I find words again. “We don’t need to get married just because I’m pregnant, Ivan.”
“I know that.” His voice is steady. “Open it.”
It’s a pendant—a rich black jewel, dark and deep, the kind of stone that seems to be doing something even sitting motionless in a velvet box.
Through it, a single streak of white opal.
Pale against the dark. Catching the light from the window and throwing it back in soft shifting colors that move when I tilt the box, blues and greens that weren’t there a second ago.
I have made jewelry-adjacent things. I have a candle shop and an eye for beautiful objects, and I have never seen anything like this in my life.
All my breath leaves me at once.
“Can I put it on you?” he says.
I nod, because I don’t trust my voice yet, and I lift my hair off my neck, and he comes around behind me and I feel the cool weight of the stone settle against my chest and the clasp click shut, and when I look down at it, it sits exactly where it should, exactly how it should, like it has always been there and just hadn’t found me yet.
“Ivan.”
“I’m in love with you, Luna. I want you here,” he says.
“Permanently. You, and the baby, and the fish.” A small pause.
“Not because of the baby. Not because of what Jaba did. I have tried, these past several days, to build a version of my life that doesn’t have you in it.
I cannot do it. I don’t want to do it. Move in with me.
Or we can move somewhere you want to live.
I don’t care as long as we’re together.”
I sit with that for a moment. I have spent a long time being someone who processes things quickly because no one was ever going to process them for me.
I lost my parents young. I dropped out of college because the structure of it didn’t fit the shape of my brain, and I had Marty’s kitchen table to learn at instead. And now there’s this.
Someone offering to do all of that with me.
“I should tell you that I’m probably neurodivergent. Like, undiagnosed but probably. So, our kid might be too. And the fish is non-negotiable.”
“I had already worked that out about you,” Ivan says, with something that might be the start of a smile. “And Hairy has a standing place in my home. I’ve already spoken to Darya about tank placement.”
I laugh. It comes out of me before I can stop it, sudden and real, and something in my chest that has been held tight since the basement finally lets go all at once. “Okay. Yes. I’ll move in.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me for a second like he’s making sure he heard correctly, and then he crosses the space between us and kisses me.
We end up back in his bedroom, and the celebration that follows is thorough and unhurried and leaves the pendant the only thing either of us is wearing by the end of it.
The morning brings something else.
Olga’s piece runs in a Chicago lifestyle magazine, and it is good. It is better than good. There’s a photo of the shop window, the lavender and smoke display Olga insisted on restyling against my initial objections and was, infuriatingly, completely right about.
There’s a shot of my hands mid-pour that I don’t even remember someone taking, the wax catching the light in a way that makes the whole process look almost ceremonial, which I suppose it is, in its own small way.
The writer calls the shop “a small bright thing in a city that needs more of them,” which I read three times before I let myself believe it was about me.
When I call Cherry, she screams in a register I have never heard from her before, the kind of sound that doesn’t belong to words anymore, loud enough that Mike, somewhere on her end of the call, asks if everything’s okay in a voice that suggests he’s already halfway to the door and bringing the good first aid kit.
We close the shop early, which I have never done before, and which feels appropriately rebellious given the circumstances.
We get drinks—mine virgin, because of the baby, but everyone else’s decidedly not—at the bar two doors down, the one with the good jukebox and the bartender who knows Cherry by name and by drink order.
Olga comes too, looking like she still hasn’t fully adjusted to being invited places just for fun, hovering near the edge of the group until Cherry physically pulls her a chair.
“You’ve got good instincts,” Cherry tells her, raising her glass, “for someone who married the wrong man.”
Olga laughs. “I’m working on that.”
I sit there with my club soda and look around the table—Olga laughing at something Cherry said, the two of them an unlikely pair who somehow work.
My employees are still buzzing about the photo of themselves in a real magazine.
All of it exists because of something I built out of nothing with my own two hands, in a shop that almost didn’t survive a broken window. I did this.
My phone buzzes.
I saw the piece. Congratulations.
Thirty seconds later, another: Darya cried.
I laugh so hard I have to sit down before I embarrass myself, because the baby has decided my bladder is now permanent real estate.