Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
I walk through the lobby doors and there is a man at the concierge desk. Early thirties. Brown hair, open face, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He’s carrying a box of books and talking to the concierge about a delivery, and when the lobby door closes behind me he turns and the box wobbles and three books slide off the top and I catch one before it hits the marble floor.
“Nice catch.” He grins. The grin is easy and warm and uncomplicated and doesn’t carry a single layer of subtext. “I’m Jeff. Just moved in. Ninth floor.”
My floor.
“Daisy,” I tell him. “Tenth floor, actually. They number oddly here.”
He laughs. I laugh. It comes out before I can stop it, a real laugh, the first one in months, and the sound of it surprises me so much that I laugh harder and Jeff laughs with me and the lobby fills with the sound of two people who have found something funny in a marble building that takes itself very seriously.
I don’t see Anton.
But he’s there. I learn later that he was coming through the back entrance from the car park. That he stopped. That he stood in the corridor between the car park and the lobby and he saw me laughing, really laughing, with a man he’d never seen. That the man touched my elbow to balance the box and the touch was familiar and easy and carried none of the weight that every touch between Anton and me has carried since the first day in the conference room.
I don’t know any of this yet.
I only know that I laughed, and it felt like breathing after a long time underwater, and the man on my floor has an easy grin and carries too many books and his name is Jeff Peterson and he doesn’t know who I am or what I’ve survived and the not-knowing is the most restful thing I’ve felt in months.
Chapter ****11
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.