Chapter 11
DAISY
Jeff Peterson owns too many books, cannot cook, and has the uncomplicated warmth of a man who has never destroyed anyone.
I learn this over the course of weeks. He’s an architect.
He moved to Monaco for a project, something to do with sustainable marina design, and his unit on my floor is half-unpacked boxes and half-drafting table and he apologises for the mess every time I come over, which is often now, because Jeff Peterson is easy and I have forgotten what easy feels like.
He brings me soup when I’m tired. Real soup, not the ginger tea that appears outside my door each morning from a man two floors up who won’t knock.
Jeff brings soup he bought from the deli on the corner because he can’t cook, and he carries it in a paper bag and knocks on my door and says, “I figured you might be hungry,” and the figuring is simple and kind and carries no subtext and no agenda and no years of reading people.
He asks about my day. He listens to the answer.
He doesn’t catalogue my micro-expressions or calculate the probability that I’m performing sincerity.
He just listens, and when I tell him something funny he laughs, and when I tell him something hard his face softens in a way that is compassionate rather than analytical, and being near him is like standing in a room with all the windows open after months in a sealed vault.
We spend time together. Coffee in the lobby.
Walks along the harbour that get longer as my belly gets rounder and my stamina gets shorter.
He adjusts his pace without being asked.
He carries my water bottle without making a production of it.
He treats my pregnancy as a fact rather than a complication, and he never asks about the father, and the not-asking is a kindness so specific it makes my throat ache.
I like him. I truly like him. And I’m trying—I’m trying so hard to let myself want this.
The safe thing. The clean thing. The man with no blood on his hands and no empire behind his name and no history of breaking women on the altar of his own certainty.
Jeff Peterson is everything Anton Almazov isn’t, and I’m trying to let that be enough.
It isn’t.
I know this because every morning I open my door and the ginger tea is there, and I pick it up and I drink it and the warmth of it settles my stomach and my hand shakes holding the thermos and the shaking has nothing to do with nausea.
I know this because in the elevator, when Anton’s cologne catches me and his arm is above my head holding the door, I close my eyes for a moment and that moment contains everything I’m trying to give Jeff.
I know this because at night, when Jeff texts me something funny or kind or uncomplicated, I smile at my phone and the smile is real but it doesn’t reach the place where Anton lives, and Anton lives in a place I can’t evict him from no matter how many walks I take or how much soup I eat or how many times I tell myself that a man with clean hands is what I deserve.
But I keep trying. Because trying is all I have.
ANTON
The jealousy is eating me alive.
I don’t have the right to feel it. I know this.
I chose not to believe her. I chose to treat her body like evidence.
I chose to kiss her forehead and call her remarkable and drive to her apartment and prove my thesis with my hands on her skin, and the consequence of those choices is that I don’t get to feel anything about the architect on her floor who brings her soup and makes her laugh in the lobby and touches her elbow with the casual intimacy of a man who has never had to earn the right to be near her.
I don’t interfere.
This is my penance. I stand at my window and I see them on the harbour walk, she’s six months now and her belly rounds against her coat and he adjusts his pace for her and carries her water and the distance between them shrinks with each walk, and I grip my phone and I don’t call, I don’t text, I don’t go downstairs.
Andrei comes.
He lets himself in. He takes one look at me standing at the window in clothes I’ve been wearing since yesterday and his scar catches the afternoon light and his expression carries the particular blend of love and pity that only a twin can deliver.
“You look terrible.”
“I’m watching the mother of my child fall in love with someone who deserves her.”
Andrei is silent for a long time. He crosses to the window and stands beside me and we are two men in a penthouse looking down at a harbour where a woman is walking with a man who isn’t us, and my brother’s silence is not empty.
It is the silence of a man who once believed himself a monster, who once stood on the wrong side of a door while the woman he loved wept on the other side, who knows something about the particular agony of believing yourself too ruined for the thing you want most.
“And what makes you so certain you don’t?” he asks.
I turn to him. “Don’t what?”
“Deserve her.”
I have no answer. Andrei doesn’t wait for one.
He puts his hand on my shoulder, the same hand, the same shoulder, the same single squeeze, and he leaves, and I stand at the window and the harbour burns and Daisy and the architect have disappeared around the bend of the coast road and I’m alone with my brother’s question and no answer that doesn’t terrify me.
DAISY
The pool area is warm. Late afternoon. The water is still and turquoise and the sun is low enough to gild everything in amber and Jeff is sitting beside me on a lounger and we have been talking for an hour about nothing and everything and his hand is resting on the arm of his chair, close to mine, and I know what’s coming before it comes.
He turns to me. His face is open and kind and carries the particular tenderness of a man who has thought about this moment and decided to be brave, and I like his face and I like his bravery and I wish, with a desperation that borders on grief, that liking were enough.
“Daisy.”
I could stop him. I could turn away or change the subject or mention the baby or the weather or the sustainable marina project or any of the thousand things that would redirect this moment.
I don’t stop him because stopping him would be a kindness to me and an unkindness to him, and Jeff Peterson deserves to be heard.
He leans in. He kisses me.
His mouth is warm and gentle and tastes like the coffee we were drinking and his hand finds my cheek, the same gesture, the same placement, the same tender cupping that another man performed in a penthouse a lifetime ago, and I wait for my body to respond.
It doesn’t.
My mouth stays closed. My hands stay in my lap.
My heart, which should be racing or fluttering or doing any of the things a heart does when a good man kisses you in golden light by a turquoise pool, beats at its normal pace, undisturbed, as if the kiss is happening to someone else and my body is merely observing.
Jeff pulls back.
He searches my face. He searches it for a long time, nothing like how Anton searches, not calculating or cataloguing, but with the open, hoping gaze of a man who wants to find something and is already understanding that it isn’t there.
“You have your answer, Daisy.”
His voice is gentle. Not bitter. Not hurt enough to turn angry. Hurt enough to accept, that nods, that understands something the other person hasn’t said and doesn’t need to.
I cry.
I don’t mean to. I don’t want to. But the tears come because Jeff Peterson just kissed me beside a pool in Monaco and my body refused to feel it and the refusal is the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself for weeks: can I want the uncomplicated thing?
Can I choose the man with clean hands? Can I build a life on liking when loving has already ruined me?
No. The answer is no. And the no breaks me open because it means Anton Almazov has taken something from me that I can’t get back, not my virginity, though that too, but my ability to want anyone else.
He lives in a place inside me that I can’t empty and Jeff can’t fill and no amount of soup or harbour walks or uncomplicated warmth can reach.
Jeff holds me while I cry. He puts his arm around my shoulders and he pulls me against his chest and he lets me sob into his shirt and he doesn’t ask why and he doesn’t push and he’s kind, so kind, and the kindness is what makes it worse because I am crying in the arms of the man I should want over the man I can’t stop wanting.
I don’t see the penthouse window above us.
I don’t see Anton standing behind the glass, two floors up, his hand on the frame, watching a woman cry in another man’s arms and building the wrong story. Again.
I pull back from Jeff’s chest. I wipe my eyes. He hands me a napkin from the poolside table and I take it and press it against my face and when I lower it he is still there, still kind, still not angry.
“It’s the guy upstairs, isn’t it,” he says. Not a question.
I nod.
“The one who leaves the tea.”
I nod again. My throat is thick.
Jeff looks at me for a long moment. Then he leans forward and kisses my forehead, and the forehead kiss from Jeff Peterson is nothing like the forehead kiss from Anton Almazov, because this one is a goodbye and not a verdict and the difference is everything, and he stands up and he picks up his coffee cup and he says, “Go tell him, Daisy,” and he walks inside.
The pool is still. The sun is low. The water is turquoise and the air is warm and I am sitting alone on a lounger with mascara on a napkin and a baby in my belly and the taste of the wrong man on my mouth and the right man two floors above me who is probably, right now, reading this scene the way he reads everything: with his eyes and not his heart.
I stand up. I go inside. I press the elevator button.
Going up.