Epilogue
LUNA
Margot Ambrose Fedorov sleeps in her bassinet beside our bed. And at two in the morning, she wakes me to let me know she’s ready to eat, and there is no negotiating with her about timing.
I’m three weeks postpartum and operating on the kind of exhaustion that’s stopped registering as exhaustion and started feeling like a permanent condition of being alive.
I feed her in the rocking chair we set up in the corner, and she eats with the same total focus she brings to everything.
I watch her tiny fierce face in the dim light from the hallway and feel the ache of loving something this much.
It's not a metaphor. It is a literal ache, somewhere behind my ribs, every single time.
She was named for no one. We talked about it for months—Ivan’s mother’s name, my mother’s name, some combination that would honor someone—and in the end, we looked at her in the hospital, hours old, already looking like she had a whole personality we had no input on.
We both knew at the same time that she wasn’t going to be anyone’s tribute.
She was going to be entirely herself, starting immediately. Margot. Just Margot, with our names trailing behind her like something she’s carrying rather than something that defines her.
She finishes eating. Margot has decided that two in the morning is a reasonable time to be briefly, intensely awake, gripping my finger with a strength that seems disproportionate to her overall size, studying my face like she’s trying to memorize it.
I burp her. I change her. I walk her around the bedroom while she does the thing where she stares at a point past my shoulder, and then, gradually, her eyes get heavier, and her grip on my finger loosens.
Eventually, she settles. I put her back in the bassinet.
She makes one small sound of protest and then nothing.
I stand over her for a long moment just watching her breathe.
The small rise and fall of her chest, the occasional twitch of a hand, the complete unguarded trust of a creature who has no idea yet that the world contains anything but the people who love her.
I do this more than is probably necessary. I cannot seem to stop.
I’m wide awake now, the kind of wide-awake a body gets that has been interrupted and has no intention of going gracefully back to sleep, so I go to the kitchen for water.
Ivan’s already there.
He’s standing at the counter in the dark, in pajama pants and nothing else, the baby monitor in one hand and a glass of water in the other, watching the audio display on the monitor like it might reveal something new if he looks at it long enough.
The little bars of green light pulse with the ambient sound of the room.
“She’s fine.”
“I know.” He doesn’t put the monitor down.
This is the thing about Ivan Fedorov that nobody who knew him nine months ago would have predicted. Everybody who knows him now finds it completely unsurprising. He’s been meticulous about fatherhood in a way that borders on the operatic.
He read—I counted, because I found the stack on his nightstand and could not resist counting—four dozen books on infant development, attachment theory, sleep training philosophies he then debated with himself out loud in our kitchen, and the history of swaddling techniques across different cultures, which I did not know was a category of book that existed until I found one in his stack with a Post-it flagging page sixty-three.
He asked our doctor questions in the third trimester that made her blink, then laugh, then answer them seriously, because that’s the only response available to Ivan’s questions—you either laugh or you answer them, and usually both.
And then there was the hospital. Margot was forty minutes old when they finally put her in his arms, and the room had a hush to it that I will remember for the rest of my life.
The nurse stepping back, the machines beeping their ordinary rhythms, and Ivan looking down at this small, furious, red-faced demon like she had just rearranged the entire architecture of his existence without asking permission first.
I watched a man who had broken bones with his bare hands, who had burned down a building, who runs an organization built in no small part on fear, hold seven pounds of infant like she was the single most important object that had ever existed.
He was completely undone. I have loved him for a long time now. But I don’t think I have ever loved him more than I did in that exact moment.
I cross the kitchen and lean into his side.
He’s still holding the monitor like it’s a transitional object he isn’t ready to let go of, his thumb resting near the volume dial in case he needs to act on something.
There’s nothing to act on, just the hum of the refrigerator and the green pulse of sound bars registering an empty, peaceful room.
“Darya left a casserole for tomorrow.” My brain at two in the morning runs on a strange combination of profound and mundane, and I have stopped trying to control which one comes out. “She told me it’s good for milk supply. I didn’t ask how she knows that.”
“Don’t ask. You won’t like the answer, or you’ll like it too much.”
“Marty’s coming Thursday.”
“I know. He texted me directly to confirm. He wants to bring his own car seat, which he apparently researched extensively and considers superior to ours.”
“Did you tell him ours is fine?”
“I told him he could bring whichever one made him feel useful.” A pause. “He’s very invested in being a great-uncle, and Gerty and Fred are coming, too. I’m glad they’re all coming.”
I smile against his shoulder. Marty has been insufferable with joy since we told him, has already started a list of gardening books he intends to read to Margot starting the moment she can hold her own head up, and Gerty and Fred sent a card that I’m framing because it made me cry for ten straight minutes.
I have decided that is a feeling worth preserving on a wall.
They also sent blankets, booties, hats, and a truly obscene amount of other things that will end up donated.
“Olga sent more onesies. I lost count somewhere past twenty.”
“She’s been busy.”
“There was a note.” I read it three times since the day it arrived. “It said, I know I’m not technically her auntie, but I’d like to be one day. If that’s all right.”
Ivan is quiet for a moment. “She asked me the same thing. Whether it would be all right.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her family isn’t really about technicalities in our case.” He looks down at me. “She already qualifies.”
I think about Olga’s face the day she found out we were having a girl—how she cried, this woman who spent years training herself not to show anything she felt at all, and how she has spent every month since becoming someone none of us expected.
Funny. Loyal. Finally, finally allowed to take up space in a life that used to ask her to be smaller in every direction at once.
Hugo, for his part, has been better than any of us expected too.
Slower than Ivan, more cautious about it, still finding his footing, but better.
He sent a single gift for Margot—a small leather-bound journal, blank, with a note that said simply, for when she’s old enough to want to write things down.
It was either the most thoughtful gift anyone gave us or proof that Hugo has been reading the parenting books too.
It’s strange. I was certain I was that this was a one-night thing, a piece of theater with an expiration date stamped somewhere on it that I just hadn’t found yet. I was wrong about nearly everything that mattered, and I’ve never been happier about that.
I came to Ivan for revenge. What I got instead was an entire life I didn’t know to ask for. I got Darya’s casseroles and her unspoken approval delivered in milk-supply advice. Margot, who sleeps in her basinet right now, doing her important work, entirely herself. And Ivan’s heart in mine.
It is so much more than I went looking for. It is so much more than I knew to want.
He shifts beside me, sets the monitor down on the counter at last, and looks down at me in the dark. “Bed,” he says. “She’ll be up again in two hours.”
“I know.”
“I’ll get her this time.”
“You say that every time.”
“I mean it every time.” To be fair, he usually lives up to his word on the matter.
I let him walk me back to the bedroom with his hand at the small of my back, the way he has walked me through every room of our life since the night this all started, back when I thought I was here for one evening and a small petty victory and nothing more.
I came for revenge. Stayed for a family.
Life is funny like that.
The End.
P.S. If you enjoyed reading Baby for My Ex’s Brother, then I think you’ll enjoy Sold to My Ex’s Brother! Swipe to the next page for a quick sneak peek…