Epilogue II #2
The gala was a success. Thalia spoke for thirty-eight minutes.
She was radiant, authoritative, and sharp-tongued when a colleague from the German delegation questioned her stratigraphic methodology on question seven.
She dispatched him in three languages. English, German, and Greek, with the kind of precision that had characterized her professional style from the first week she had arrived on my island.
The room laughed. The German laughed too, after the initial flush, because Thalia had delivered the dismissal with the generosity of a woman who was confident enough in her findings to tolerate being questioned and sharp enough that the questioning would not be repeated.
I watched from the back of the room. The calculations running in my mind were no longer about variables. They were about:
How many minutes until she finished.
How quickly, once we were back at the hotel, I could remove the green dress.
Whether the nanny on the island could handle bedtime without Constantine's military-grade bedtime story routine, which involved an elaborate tactical sequence of stuffed animals positioned around the bed in defensive formation and a verbal narrative in which the stuffed animals successfully repelled every threat in the child's imaginative landscape.
How much my daughter had grown in the three days since I had last seen her.
Whether the Turkish delegation at table twenty-two was, in fact, the Turkish delegation I had been told to expect, or whether it was a different Turkish delegation requiring different management.
Whether Elena Katsaros, who was here tonight, near the west terrace, wearing ivory and speaking to the deputy minister with the composed authority of a woman who had built her own reputation independent of the Stavros name, polished and cold and running her own consulting firm out of an office in Kolonaki, having finally carved out the life she should have been permitted to have in the first place, would attend the follow-up reception I was hosting for the Swiss delegation next week.
Katerina had sent the invitation. Elena had not yet replied.
I expected she would reply no, and I expected the no would be delivered in a handwritten note that would demonstrate that she was doing well, that the demonstration would be carefully calibrated, and that the no was the correct response for both of us.
The speech ended. The applause was extended. Thalia accepted it with the small bow that academics offered to audiences they respected, and she left the stage, and she crossed the room to where I was standing, and she took my hand without speaking.
"Take me home," she said.
"Yes."
We said the necessary goodbyes. Constantine brought the car.
Spiro handled the final logistics with Katerina.
The four of us exited through the service corridor and into the Athens night.
The drive back was silent. Thalia leaned her head against my shoulder.
My hand was on her stomach, where the second daughter was not yet kicking but was, the doctor had assured us, beginning to develop the skeletal structure that would, in the third trimester, make her kicks a matter of public record.
At the hotel, Constantine did a security sweep of the suite while Spiro ordered the late supper Thalia had requested. Thalia took off the pearls and set them on the nightstand and removed the heels and sat on the edge of the bed.
I stood in the doorway and looked at her and thought about what I had become.
I had not changed. I was still the man who calculated.
I was still the man who controlled. I was still the man who had constructed a trap that looked like a choice in the first week Thalia had arrived on my island.
The manipulation was still something I was capable of.
The ruthlessness was still something I deployed, in business, in legal negotiations, in the small operational necessities that kept the family's transition functional.
I was still, by any reasonable external measurement, dangerous.
The difference was that the cage I had built had been redesigned, by the woman sitting on the edge of the bed in front of me, into a house.
The house was hers. She had done the architectural work.
I lived in it willingly. The things I now protected had expanded: they included bedtime stories and excavation permits and a woman who could still dismantle my arguments in four languages and a daughter who refused to wear shirts and a second daughter who was, at this moment, still early, still mostly invisible, still becoming and already, in my imagination, possessed of her mother's expression.
I crossed to the bed and sat beside her.
She leaned into me. Constantine entered the room with his report, the suite was clean, the perimeter was secured, Yannis had men in the lobby for the night, and then quietly withdrew to the adjoining room to make his 9 PM call.
Spiro followed him, closing the door behind them both, leaving me and Thalia alone with the late supper cart and the quiet.
"Athan."
"Yes."
"Despina asked me yesterday why you count things."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her that one of her fathers counts things because he loves what he counts, and that counting is a form of attention, and that attention is a form of love.
She thought about this for a while. Then she said: 'Mama, Papa counts me when I sleep.
' I asked her how she knew. She said: 'Because when I pretend to sleep, I can hear him counting. '"
I thought about this. It was true. I had, since the first week of Despina's life, developed the habit of standing in her doorway at night and counting, not her, exactly, but the small things that indicated her continued existence: the rise and fall of her chest, the number of times she sighed in her sleep during the three minutes I stood watching, the count of her fingers when I checked them, which I did every night despite having counted them the night before and every night before that since the moment she had been placed in my arms at the hospital in Heraklion.
"She is not supposed to be awake when I count."
"She is your daughter. She is supposed to be noticing everything."
The door to the adjoining room opened. Constantine returned.
He had made his 9 PM call. He did not report on the call directly, but I could tell from the particular set of his shoulders, a small release that was the Constantine equivalent of relief, that the call had gone well, that Despina had agreed to wear a shirt to bed, and that the nanny had managed the bedtime story without requiring his military-grade tactical narrative.
Spiro returned behind him, the pen in his hand, tapping it once against his palm before tucking it away.
The gesture was the one I had learned to read as his signal for "all is in order. "
The three of us took our positions around Thalia in the particular arrangement that had evolved over two years of this life, me on her left with my hand on her stomach, Constantine on her right with his head against her shoulder, Spiro at the foot of the bed with his hand resting on her ankle, and we talked quietly about the day and the speech and the plans for the morning.
The calculations running in my mind had become, at some point in the last two years, calculations about how to preserve this configuration rather than calculations about how to impose other configurations on the world.
Before sleep, Thalia reached for her phone and showed me a photograph her assistant had taken during the speech.
The photograph was of the three of us. Constantine, Spiro, and me, watching her from the back of the room.
Our faces were visible in three-quarter profile.
Our expressions were all different, and all the same, and I studied the image for a long time.
My daughter, in the morning, would reach for me with the untutored certainty of a child who had never yet had occasion to doubt that her reach would be met. Her sister, in approximately seven months, would do the same. I would, in both cases, be there.
I had calculated the value of every human being who had ever entered my life. I had assigned them numerical weights. I had maintained an internal ledger that had been, for fifteen years, the instrument by which I managed an empire.
I held my wife's hand, and I thought about the daughter asleep on the island, and about the daughter growing inside the woman beside me, and I thought: Incalculable.
My daughter was incalculable. Her sister was going to be incalculable. Her mother had always been incalculable, from the moment she had stepped off the ferry at my dock with the single duffel bag and the refusal to be intimidated.
Incalculable. The one word my ledger had never contained. The one value I had never learned to measure.
She was absolutely, devastatingly incalculable. And she was mine.
I turned off the bedside lamp. Thalia was already asleep against my shoulder, her breathing slow, her hand resting on the small curve of her belly where the second daughter was beginning to establish her own quiet authority.
In the adjoining room, I could hear Constantine's low voice through the wall, a second call to the nanny, unscheduled, the kind of supplementary call he made when the first call had left him with a residual unease he would not name.
Beyond that, the faint rustle of Spiro turning the pages of a book, the sound of a man who read before sleep because reading was the last thing that still required his full attention after a day in which every other activity had been automated by long practice.
I thought, in the quiet, about the fifteen years I had spent running the family before Thalia arrived.
I thought about the man I had been at twenty-eight, newly inherited the empire, angry at my parents for dying and angrier at my uncle for surviving and angriest of all at the world for organizing itself around rules I had not consented to.
I thought about the thirty-year-old I had become, colder, more efficient, more comfortable with the machinery of control.
I thought about the thirty-three-year-old who had dictated the letter that had brought Thalia to my island under the pretense of archaeological consultation and the actual pretext of a calculation I had run and lost. I thought about the man I had been on the Mykonos dock.
The man I had been on the night of the confrontation in the kitchen.
The man I had been in Heraklion, receiving the phone call that confirmed Thalia had been taken.
The man I was now, in the dark, listening to my wife breathe and counting her breaths because counting was, as my daughter had correctly diagnosed, the form of attention I had been taught to mistake for love.
I was still that man. The calculation was still how I thought.
The control was still what I reached for when the environment threatened to become disordered.
The difference was that the calculation now included variables I had once considered irrelevant, a child's laugh, a wife's methodology, a brother's silence in a dark corridor at 9 PM, and that the inclusion had changed the shape of every equation I ran.
The ledger was the same instrument. The values it measured were different.
Incalculable had entered the ledger as a permanent entry, and incalculable was the line item I now protected with everything the earlier line items had built.
Thalia sighed in her sleep. Her hand tightened slightly on mine. I closed my eyes.
THE END