Page 47 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
She didn't come to me. She let me come to her.
I took the last step onto the sidewalk and crossed the strip of pavement to the curb on legs I was operating from a slight distance.
"What are you doing here?"
"We found him."
My hand went to the iron railing of the brownstone next door without my deciding it. The cold of the iron came up through the glove. My chest did the thing a chest does when air is something a person had been doing on autopilot and is now a choice. I held the rail. I made the next breath go in. I made it go out.
"So he is alive? Three months, Sienna. Why am I hearing this now?"
"Do not be angry yet. I will tell you all of it. Just walk to the car."
"How am I not supposed to be angry? Sienna. I have been burying him for three months. I told my own mouth I was done crying for him. For me he is dead. I have started over without him."
She didn't flinch. She didn't soften her face or put a hand out. She let me have it. She stood with her back to her own car in her good coat and took every word of it square. That was how I knew the rest of what she'd come here to say was going to gut me.
"He has amnesia, Chloe. He does not know any of us. We only found him after the people who hid him were killed. He is hollowed out. He does not even know his own name without us telling it to him."
The bottom dropped out of every shelf I'd built over ninety nights to hold the grief. The grief came down off the shelves all at once and pooled at my feet. My hand went to my stomach. Asmall wet sound climbed up the back of my throat and I closed my teeth on it before it could become anything that needed witnesses.
"Did you tell him about me?"
"Not yet. It is too much for him right now. He is barely holding up the family information. He cannot carry you on top of it."
"So what am I supposed to do?"
"I am offering you a job. The girl he is taking care of, the one whose grandparents were killed, she needs a nanny. You are very good at that. He will be on the floor of the case with the brothers inside a week. You can be near him without being asked to be anything else. You decide if he gets the truth back, and you decide when."
"I don't know if I can be in a room with him and pretend I am not in love with him, Sienna."
"I am not asking you to pretend anything. I am asking you to take a job. Think about it tonight. Come to the compound tomorrow morning with your answer."
She closed the two steps between us. She kissed me once on the side of the head, the kind of press a sister puts there when she has used up the words she had and the press is what is left. She went around the front of the sedan and got in on the driver's side. The car pulled away from the curb soft, taillights swinging into the dark.
I stood on the strip of pavement between the railing and the gutter. A cab came down the block with its light on. It passed me. It didn't slow. I didn't lift my hand.
I walked.
I don't remember the blocks. I remember the cold against my front and the heat under my coat and the way the air at the back of my throat hurt by the time I came up to the green door of the walk-up with the brass mail slot Mrs. Quinn always polishedon the first of the month. Three locks. Top, middle, bottom. My fingers got the keys in the way fingers do when the head has gone elsewhere.
The apartment was dark. I didn't put a kettle on. I didn't take my coat off. I sat down on the couch in the front room with my hands flat on my knees and let the room hold me for a minute.
Then I put my hand into my coat pocket and took out the pendant.
Jacob's pendant. The small flat bar of gold on its thin chain. The character for water cut clean through the middle of it. Soft at the top where the brush had gone wide. Curved at the bottom where the brush had come back through. I had carried this thing in my pocket since the morning I had stood on the bank of the road upstate with three women I had not yet known I was about to love and a wreck of metal in the trees and no body, and Sienna had put her hand on my shoulder and not made me speak.
I held it in my palm.
I thought I had cried him out. I was wrong.The thought went through me cleanly and left.
I sat with the stone in my hand and let the breath come down.
I picked up the phone.
Mrs. Halverson answered on the second ring. The small lift in her voice she always had for me was there.
"I have a family emergency. It is going to take me a long while to get back to a regular schedule. I am so sorry. I love the boys."
