20. Ivan
IVAN
The car I assign to Luna is a dark gray Volvo, unremarkable, rotated every three days. The man inside it is one of mine—young, patient, and good at being invisible.
I chose him myself. I don’t tell Luna about any of this because she didn’t ask and because asking would require a conversation I’m not ready to have yet. The last thing I want to talk about is the size of the gap between what I know is reasonable and what I’m actually doing.
Then I call Darya.
“The woman,” I say, when she picks up.
“Luna,” Darya says, with the weight she gives words when she wants me to hear that I’m being an idiot.
“She’s pregnant.”
A pause. Then, in a tone I have not heard from Darya in all the years she has told me what she thinks of my choices, “Thanks be to God.”
“I need you to send food. Regularly. She’s going to forget to eat.”
“How do you know she forgets to eat?”
“She gets absorbed in things. She loses track of time.” I have watched her do this.
I have found her at ten in the evening, still working at her kitchen table on something, no dinner, no awareness that she has not eaten, genuinely surprised when I point it out.
“Tuesday and Thursday to start. More if she’ll accept it. ”
“She’ll accept it,” Darya says, with a certainty I find both reassuring and slightly alarming.
Darya begins sending food on Tuesday. By Thursday, she’d already amended the schedule to include Sunday, which Luna apparently not only accepted but requested.
I learn this when Luna texts me a photograph of a container of Darya’s beet salad with the message, Your housekeeper is an angel, and I will not hear otherwise.
Her building is a different matter.
I pull the security assessment myself with the super’s schedule in hand and a penlight I don’t need because the hallways are well enough lit to reveal every problem without assistance. The list I come away with is not short.
One camera at the front entrance with a blind spot that covers the east stairwell entirely.
A side door that requires a key card that apparently everyone in the building has lost and replaced so many times that the management company stopped tracking who has active credentials.
The intercom buzzes anyone in if you wait long enough and press enough buttons, which I test twice to be sure.
I don’t tell Luna any of this. She doesn’t need to worry about such things. That’s my job. And well… I’m very good at my job.
By the following Wednesday, the camera has been repositioned and a second one added. The side door now requires a code that resets weekly, so the residents are notified by email. The intercom has been replaced with a system that requires the resident to actively approve entry from their phone.
I pay for all of it through a holding company and arrange for the building’s management to receive the invoice as an anonymous infrastructure grant, which is not a thing that exists but which they accept without question because the amount is right, and people will accept almost anything if the amount is right.
Luna texts me on Thursday to mention that her building got new security cameras and isn’t that something.
I look at this message for a moment and respond, Hm. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
She sends back a single raised eyebrow emoji. Then nothing else.
I put my phone down and go back to work, and I feel, distantly, that I’m going to have to get better at this if I intend to keep getting away with it.
The book I find at the back of a medical supply catalog—not the soft-cover kind with watercolor illustrations of sleeping infants, but the clinical one, the one written by an OB for other doctors, dense with terminology and trimester-by-trimester breakdowns of what is happening inside the human body when it is doing this. I have it sent to my office.
And I read it with the door closed.
I’m on the chapter about first trimester nutrition when Darya opens the door without knocking.
She looks at the book. I look at her. There is a pause of approximately three seconds in which I consider, and discard, several things I could say.
She crosses to my desk, refills my coffee from the carafe she brought without my asking, and leaves without saying a word. The door clicks shut behind her.
I look at it for a moment. In eleven years, Darya has found me in this office doing things that would end careers and end lives, and she’s never once altered her expression.
She alters it now, just before the door closes.
I catch the edge of it. Something that on another face I might call tenderness.
I look back at the book and find my place.
Nikolai—my doctor, the one I trust with the things that cannot go to a hospital—owes me several favors.
He is thorough and discreet and has been managing the health of my organization for fourteen years without a single leak.
I explain the situation with enough detail that he understands the stakes without my having to say them plainly.
“Prenatal care,” he double-checks.
“Full. Everything she needs, whenever she needs it.”
“And she knows about this arrangement?”
“She will.”
Nikolai gives me a number. I send it to Luna that evening with a short text. You have a prenatal appointment available when you’re ready. Text this number to schedule.
I think about this message for longer than I spend on most decisions that have actual consequences, and decide it’s clear, useful, and she will appreciate having the resource.
She appears at my apartment the following afternoon, and I know before she says anything from the way she’s holding her bag—close to her body, jaw set—that I’ve made some kind of error I have not yet identified.
“The doctor,” she says.
“He’s good. The best I have access to?—”
“I’m sure he is.”
Why is she perturbed? “He’s completely discreet. No records go anywhere without?—”
“Ivan.” She sets her bag down on the entry table. “Did you ask me?”
I open my mouth. Then close it.
She presses again. “Did you ask me if I wanted you to arrange my prenatal care?”
The answer is no . The answer is self-evidently no, and I’m aware of this, and I’m also aware that what I’m about to say next is not going to improve the situation. But I say it anyway because it’s true. “I was trying to get you the best resource available.”
She looks at me with an expression that removes several layers of finish from the wall behind me. “I know that. I’m not stupid.”
“Then—”
“Then ask.” Her voice doesn’t rise. That’s the thing about Luna—she doesn’t need volume.
Her tone is enough to whittle me down to size.
“If we’re doing this together, I’m the one carrying this baby.
My body. My decisions about my body. You don’t arrange things that have to do with my body without asking me first.”
I look at her. She looks at me. The entry hall is very quiet.
“You can choose someone else.” The least I can do when I’m wrong is to admit it without arguing.
Something in her face shifts. Not softness, exactly. More like the recalibration of a woman deciding what to do with a man who has just managed to surprise her. “I’ll keep the doctor. He sounds good.”
“He’s the best.”
“But you ask first. From now on. You ask.”
“Understood.”
She picks up her bag. Then she looks at me sideways, with the look she gets when she’s deciding how much to say. “The car, Ivan.”
I suspect I know what she’s speaking of, so I try to redirect her. “You want a car? What kind? You can have your pick.”
“The gray Volvo. The one outside my building for days now. I made it on day four.”
“Luna—”
“I understand why you’re doing it,” she cuts in. “I do. Your job is what it is, and I’m not naive about that.” She holds up a hand before I can speak. “But I’m not living my life with a tail on me. I won’t do it. If something feels wrong, I’ll call you. I promise I’ll call you.”
Every instinct I have argues with this, but I just sigh. “I’ll pull him.”
“Thank you.”
“If anything feels off?—”
“I’ll call you.” She meets my eyes. “I said, I promise.”
She means it. Luna doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean, which is one of approximately ten thousand things about her that has dismantled me incrementally since the night I met her.
“How else can I be of assistance this evening?”
She rolls her eyes at me and smirks. “Let me in?”
“Of course.” I step aside and fetch her water, and we settle in for the evening.
I pull the Volvo via text and spend the following three days not looking at the feed from the new building cameras. Eventually.
If she knew of them, she’d be mad, and I’m trying to respect that, even though it’s stupid. I check four more times before I stop checking today and pour myself a drink instead.
There are things I’m learning to hold loosely. I’m not good at it. I have never had to be before. Everything I’ve built has been built on the principle that loose hands lose things, and Luna is asking me to be a different kind of man than the one that principle made. I’m trying.
Trying and failing.
Two weeks after the Volvo comes off and the building cameras are the only eyes I have on her, I find myself at my desk with a notepad and a problem I have never had before in my life.
I’ve organized the movement of cargo across six countries. I’ve managed the logistics of operations that required the coordination of forty men across three time zones. I’ve negotiated deals in rooms where the wrong word meant someone didn’t go home.
But… Now, I’m staring at a blank piece of paper trying to figure out how to plan a baby shower.
Darya, when I call her, doesn’t laugh at me.
This is one of the things I pay her for, although we’ve never discussed it in those terms. She listens to what I want—something small, Luna’s closest people, the right food, nothing that will embarrass her or feel like a production—and I can hear her thinking on the other end of the line.
“The candle shop,” Darya says.
“Excuse me?”
“After hours. Her own space. People she trusts, in a place she loves.” A pause. “She’ll feel safe. More in control.”
Darya has, in approximately forty seconds, solved a problem that had me staring at a blank page.
“Brilliant.”
She sighs. “Stop being so controlling. She doesn’t like it.”
“She told you?”
“A woman knows. Now, for party colors?—”
“There are colors for a baby shower?”
She pauses. “It’s good you called me, Ivan. The colors…”
As she speaks, and I try to pay attention, I realize there’s not a man in my organization—not Armin, not a captain, not anyone who has ever sat across a table from me—who would believe Ivan Fedorov is planning a baby shower with his housekeeper.
By the end of the call, I picture it. Luna will walk into her own shop after hours and find it full of flowers and the people who love her, and she will not be able to object, because some things are simply true regardless of whether you were consulted—and one of them is that she completely deserves this.
I fully intend to make sure she has everything she’s ever wanted.