30. Ivan
IVAN
I text her at noon.
How is Hairy?
Something simple. Nothing that requires a response but leaves the door open for one.
I’ve been composing and deleting versions of this text for days, which I will never tell anyone. Three words. Casual. The kind of thing you send when you are not thinking about someone constantly and simply happen to think of them in passing.
Definitely not a sign of sheer desperation for contact.
I put the phone down. I pick it up four minutes later. No response.
I put it down again and go back to the quarterly numbers Armin has left on my desk, which require attention and which I give approximately forty percent of my attention to for the next hour, while the other sixty percent sits on my phone like a weight.
She’s not going to respond. I know this. She told me to go, and she’s had days to decide how she feels about that. Apparently, she’s not going to respond to a text about her fish. Which is reasonable. Which I understand. Which does not make it easier to look at the quarterly numbers.
Armin comes in at two with the supplier update.
I say three words that are not the right three words, and he stops talking and looks at me. I only notice because of the silence. “I’m fine,” I say, before he can say whatever he is going to say.
“You snapped at Petrov this morning.”
“Petrov was being slow.”
“Petrov is always slow. You’ve never snapped at him before. He has a condition. You have never been cruel about it.”
I look at the window. I look back at Armin. “I apologize for snapping at you.”
“You didn’t snap at me.”
“I’m apologizing preemptively.”
Armin is quiet for a moment, the way he is when he is deciding how much to push. “When did you last take a vacation?”
“I don’t take vacations.”
“Hence the need for one. Or several.”
“I’m fine, Armin. I’m dealing with an unforeseen distraction. It will resolve itself.”
He looks at me with the expression he keeps for things he disagrees with and has decided not to argue about, then takes the supplier update and goes.
I look at the closed door for a moment. Then I pick up my phone to try her again. There is a text from Hugo.
I look at it for a long moment. Three words, which for Hugo is either a threat or a confession, and threats from Hugo currently have nowhere to go, so I open it.
I fucked up.
I read it twice. I put the phone down. I pick it up.
In all my years of knowing Hugo Dumas, I have never received anything from him that could be reasonably described as an apology. Not when he was seventeen and broke my father’s watch. Not when he was twenty-six and tried to cut me out of the Lakeview deal. Not once, in all of it.
The closest I have ever gotten is a certain silence that means he knows he was wrong and has decided not to address it.
I send back, Call me.
He calls in two minutes. There is a long pause after I pick up, and I let it sit, because I’m curious which version of Hugo is on the other end of it. The pause ends.
“Ivan.” Stiff. Careful. Like a man who has rehearsed this and is already off-script.
“Hugo.” Another pause. I let that sit too.
“I don’t know where to start,” he says.
“I do,” I say. “Bratislava.”
He breathes out. He knows what I mean.
I go through it—not quickly, not cruelly, but completely.
Bratislava. Geneva. Witte’s courier. Jaba.
The route change that cost me a contact I had spent four years cultivating.
The account in his mother’s name. Luna’s window.
Decades of rudeness to me. Every item, in order, stated plainly.
“… You can begin with any of them. Take your pick.”
“I know,” he says. “I know all of it. I’m sorry, Ivan.”
The words nearly take the breath out of my lungs. At first, I’m not sure what to say to him.
I think about what Luna told me once, in passing—about her sister, about the girl who traded the right things for the wrong ones and couldn’t see it because she was too busy comparing. Too busy being jealous of Luna. How Luna said it, without anger, just with sorrow for the waste of it.
“Were you jealous of me?” I ask. “When our parents married.”
The silence that follows is a different kind from the ones before it. “You were the black sheep oldest son who did things his own way and had dangerous friends,” Hugo says slowly. “I was a teenage boy with acne, good grades, and no friends. Of course, I was fucking jealous.”
I sit with that and almost laugh. How was I so blind before now?
It does not excuse anything. But it shifts something—small, like a piece of furniture moved two inches, the room unfamiliar in a way you can’t immediately name.
I’ve spent years reading Hugo Dumas as a man who wanted what I had out of greed and entitlement, and there is truth in that reading.
But there’s also a teenage boy with acne and no friends standing next to someone who didn’t have to try and hating him for it, and both things are true simultaneously, which is more complicated than I prefer my enemies to be.
“Is that why you’ve been a giant pain in my ass this whole time?”
“Yes,” Hugo says, without hesitation. “Wholeheartedly, yes.” He tells me about it then—about getting his face rearranged, about lying on a floor looking at a ceiling and arriving at a series of conclusions about his own behavior that he had been successfully avoiding for decades.
“… you have never hurt anyone without cause, Ivan. I’ve always respected that about you.
And I gave you more cause than most people.
I never would have understood that without being on a floor in significant pain, questioning all my life choices.
It was an unpleasant realization to have in that position, but better I recognize that now instead of right before I die, I suppose. ”
I find, against my better judgment, that I believe him. I don’t want to. Decades of experience tell me not to. But I do.
“So, this is the start of my apology tour. I wanted to start with you,” he says. “And I was hoping—if you were feeling generous—that you might say something to Luna on my behalf.”
“You wish to make amends with her, too?”
He pauses. “I want to reach out to her. Apologize. I want to make amends to the people I’ve hurt. I know it’s a long list.” Another pause. “I’m going reverse chronologically. But after what I did, I doubt she’d welcome me in her shop.”
I think about what she said to me when I stood in her kitchen with my taped hand—about not wanting violence done in her name, about wanting to bring light into dark places, about asking me to be something other than what I’m and my not being able to do it.
I think she would find a genuine apology from Hugo interesting. She’s curious about people in the way that people who are good at people tend to be curious. She would hear him out. She might not forgive him, but she would hear him.
“And Olga? I’d say you owe her apologies, too.”
“If she’ll still have me.” He says it quietly. “I’m going to fix this. Or try. I know there’s no guarantee. I’m not owed a guarantee, wedding ring or not.”
This is news I was not prepared for. “What do you mean, if she’ll still have you. Did she?—”
“She moved out,” Hugo says. “She found out I cheated with her on Luna. She did research, and then she asked Luna directly, and Luna—” He stops. “Luna didn’t make me sound worse than I was. Which I did not deserve.”
No. She wouldn’t. Luna is infuriatingly fair about people, even the ones who have earned worse.
I think about my own list of errors, which is shorter than Hugo’s but includes items that count.
The lie I told in her kitchen. The reason I gave was true and wrong at the same time.
The night I walked down her stairs and didn’t look back, which I told myself was respect for what she asked and which was also the easiest exit available to me, and I have been living in the gap between those two things for days.
“You have a lot of making up for lost time to do,” I say. “You can’t rush it. Every slip-up will be accounted for.”
“I know.”
“She’s not a woman who forgets. She forgives, maybe. She doesn’t forget.”
“I know. I don’t expect anything from her. If she’s not open to it, I keep my distance. I won’t push.”
I’m quiet for a moment. “I should tell you—I’m no longer with Luna. So whether you reach out is your own decision to make.”
Hugo is quiet for a beat. “What happened? You seemed—” He stops himself. “Never mind. It’s not my business.”
“My work is not for everyone.”
He understands what I mean by that. I can hear it in the pause.
“I’m sorry, Ivan,” he says. “Thank you for talking to me. I know a single phone call doesn’t fix anything.
But I’m sorry, Ivan. For all of it. For all the years of being a giant asshole to you.
I’d rather be your brother instead. One day. If you’ll have me.”
I don’t know if this is Hugo running a longer game than I’ve given him credit for. I don’t know if a broken nose, a floor, and a reckoning have actually changed anything about the man, or if this is the same manipulation dressed in different clothes.
What I know is that hearing those words from him—I’d rather be your brother—is enough to make me want to hear more from him.
I’ve never wanted to hear more from Hugo Dumas.
This is the first time it has meant something else, and while I don’t entirely trust it, I find I’m willing to follow it anyway.
Something about days of silence from Luna has screwed with my risk tolerance.
“Give me time, Hugo. But we can work on this. Maybe one day, you’ll be my brother. Instead of the asshole in a suit.”
“Hey, I still wear the hell out of a suit. Broken face or not.”
We say goodbye and hang up, and I sit with the phone in my hand and the quiet in my office. There are long roads and people who arrive at things late. Is late better than never? I don’t know.
I text Luna. I’d like to talk. When you’re ready.
I watch the screen for longer than I’m going to admit. No response. No read receipt. Nothing.
I put the phone down and pick it up twice more in the following hour and get the same result, which is what I got this morning and what I have been getting for days, and I’m running out of interpretations that don’t arrive at the same place.
She’s not ready. Or she’s ready, and the answer is still no.
Luna opens the shop. I’ll be there at fifteen after with coffee, and I will not text first because texting has gotten me nothing, and showing up is the one move I haven’t tried.
She can tell me to go when I get there. She can send me away. That is her right, and I will respect it. But I’m going first. She can decide what to do with me when I get there.
It is, at minimum, a plan.