Chapter 2
Maeve
The Upgrade
My laptop has been open to the same case file for forty-seven minutes.
I know because I’ve been watching the clock in the corner of the screen instead of reading the case itself. Watching it the way a normal person watches the news. Engaged. Concerned. And doing nothing about it at all.
The case file is straightforward. A trademark dispute.
A regional bakery in Worcester is being sued by a national chain over a logo that uses a vaguely similar font and a vaguely similar wheat motif.
I’ve been hired by the bakery to argue that wheat motifs are, in fact, in the public domain.
This is the third hour of my third reading.
I have nothing left to learn from this document. I’m just stalling.
I’m stalling because I know what’s coming.
Federal protective detail. Replacement. The first one rotated off this morning. There’s been a security upgrade. I don’t know what the upgrade means.
I know what it costs. I know I cannot afford to put Nora in a hotel until the grand jury testimony, and I know I cannot put her in a hotel even if I could afford to, because Nora is almost three, and a hotel is a place where her routine breaks.
So whoever is coming is coming here. To my apartment.
To the place where my daughter sleeps and feels safe.
I close the laptop, and then open it again.
Then close it.
It’s been two weeks since the photograph of Nora at daycare arrived in a manila envelope on my doorstep, and I’ve not slept more than four hours straight in any of those weeks.
I’m running on coffee and the kind of low-grade adrenaline that makes a person sharp for about forty-eight hours and then makes them stupid. I’m at hour five hundred.
Which means I’m very stupid.
I push back from the table and go to check on Nora.
She’s asleep. She’s always asleep when I check. The checking is mostly for me. I stand in her doorway in the half-dark, and I look at her small body curled around the stuffed elephant. I count her breaths.
Eight. Ten. Twelve.
Brontos, the elephant, is missing an eye, and most of his stuffing is concentrated in his trunk.
He’s been with her since she was nine months old.
He’s been to two emergency rooms, one ER for an ear infection and one for a fever I could not get below a hundred and three.
He’s been in the laundry more times than I can count, and he is, by any reasonable metric, a piece of fabric trash.
He’s also the most important object in this apartment.
My phone vibrates on the kitchen counter.
I don’t move toward it.
I look at my daughter for another twenty seconds. I memorize her, the way I’ve been memorizing her for weeks, because that’s what a mother does when she’s been told that someone has put a hundred thousand dollars on her head and it’s personal.
I let out a sigh and then close her door gently, making my way back to the kitchen.
The galley kitchen is the reason I signed the lease. It has original 1948 green subway tile, with six chips along the bottom row, I couldn’t afford to replace—and wouldn’t if I could.
Afternoon light pools through the window over the sink, illuminating a basil plant I’ve had to replace four times; turns out I can keep a child alive, but herbs don't stand a chance. Between the white cabinets, original brass handles, and the cupped wood floor where Nora scuffs the finish running her circuits, it’s the first space that has ever truly belonged to me.
After an adult life spent in borrowed rooms, this kitchen is mine, the way Nora is mine.
I built this sanctuary from nothing, and there is nobody else to take the credit.
And I have a sick feeling I’m about to leave it.
I finally reach over and pick up my phone.
It’s the federal protective detail. The text is short.
ETA 8:00. Two operatives. Lead operative will introduce. Stand down acknowledgment requested.
I type back. Acknowledged.
I set the phone face down on the counter.
And then, because I’m the kind of woman who handles a threat by making tea, I heat up the kettle. Earl Grey. The good kind that Eileen sent from Galway last Christmas, which I’ve been rationing because once it’s gone, I’ll not have a cousin to send me more.
I pour the boiling water and watch the steam. I let the tea steep for the four minutes the box says, timing it exactly, because I’m a person who follows directions when I’m scared.
And while the tea steeps, I think about the gala.
? ? ?
It was August. Three years ago. A Boston charity gala for a children's hospital, hosted at the Greek consulate.
I went because I was twenty-eight and a third-year associate at a firm that needed someone to cover a partner who was throwing up oysters in a hotel bathroom. I went in a green dress my mother had picked out for my cousin's wedding two months earlier and had survived the wedding without alteration.
I went alone. I drank one and a half glasses of free champagne.
I stood near a window with a view of the harbor and a clean line to the exit because the year before that I had been at a firm event where a senior associate put his hand on my back and asked me to come look at something on the second floor, and I had learned, in the way women learn, to always know where the exit was.
I saw him before he saw me.
He didn’t just look at me; he dismantled me from across the room. While the two men beside him chirped like frantic birds, Lex Konstantinos stood like a monolith of dark, tailored wool and quiet violence. When our eyes locked, the air in the consulate didn't just thin—it vanished.
Thirty seconds. In that time, I felt the pulse in my throat begin to throb, a rhythmic betrayal. I didn't just see the way his eyes darkened; I felt the physical pull of him, like a riptide beneath a calm surface.
When I finally crossed the floor, the heels of my shoes clicking against the marble sounded like a countdown. As I reached him, the scent hit me—sandalwood, expensive tobacco, and something cold, like steel.
"You’re a long way from the exit," he murmured. His voice was a low, melodic rasp that seemed to vibrate straight into my bones.
"I found something better to look at," I countered, my bravado thin but sharp.
He didn't smile. Instead, he leaned down, his breath grazing the shell of my ear, sending a violent shiver down my spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.
"Careful, moro mou," he whispered, his Greek accent curling around the words like a velvet noose. "Once you stop looking for the exit, I stop letting you find it."
His hand found the small of my back—not a polite touch, but a claim.
His palm was searingly hot through the thin silk of my green dress, his thumb tracing the dip of my spine with a slow, deliberate pressure that made my knees weak.
I stared at the tiny scar at the corner of his mouth, and the urge to taste it was so sudden, so primal, it terrified me.
The cab ride was a blur of streetlights and heavy silence, the kind that happens right before a storm breaks. By the time the door to the penthouse clicked shut, the air was screaming.
He didn't rush. He was a man used to taking what he wanted, but he moved with the agonizing patience of a collector. He stripped his jacket off, his eyes never leaving mine, then his tie, revealing the column of a throat I wanted to bruise with my teeth.
"Are you sure?" he asked, his voice rougher now. He stepped into my space, his tall frame casting a shadow that swallowed me whole.
"Yes," I breathed.
He took a step closer, his thighs brushing against the silk of my skirt. He caught my chin between his thumb and forefinger, forcing me to look up into the predatory depths of his eyes. "Tell me again. Are you sure you want this? Because once I touch you, I’m not just a memory. I’m a mark."
"I'm sure," I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
He leaned in, his nose brushing mine, his scent overwhelming every sense I had left. "Third time's the charm," he rasped against my lips. "Are you mine tonight?"
"Yes."
The word had barely left my lips before he turned me, pinning me against the cool grain of the door.
His hands were everywhere—mapping the curve of my hips, tangling in my hair, pulling my head back to expose the line of my throat.
When his teeth grazed the sensitive skin just below my ear, a sob of pure, unadulterated want broke out of me.
He didn't just make love to me; he colonized me.
Every touch was heavy, demanding, and impossibly precise.
When he finally sank into me, his eyes were wide, fixed on mine with a terrifying intensity.
He watched the way my face crumpled, the way my breath hitched, the way I came undone under the sheer power of him.
He wasn't just watching a woman peak; he was memorizing the frequency of my soul.
He said my name—not as a question, but as a prayer and a threat. Like he’d been waiting a lifetime to taste the syllables on his tongue.
I woke up later to the sound of the shower. The room smelled of us—of sweat, expensive sheets, and the lingering ghost of his cologne.
I looked at his side of the bed, the indentation still there.
I knew then. If he walked out of that bathroom and looked at me with those dark, possessive eyes, I was finished.
I wouldn't just be an associate at a firm; I would be a satellite orbiting his sun.
I would be the woman my mother warned me about—the one ruined by a man who knew her name before he even met her.
I dressed in the dark, my fingers shaking as I zipped the green silk. I fled not because it was bad, but because it was the only thing that had ever felt truly, dangerously right.
I left the ghost of Lex Konstantinos in that room, never realizing that you don't just walk away from a man like him. You just give him a head start.
Six weeks later, I missed my period.
Eight weeks later, I was holding a positive test in the bathroom of my firm's eighteenth-floor office at 6:15 in the morning.
Ten weeks later, I was sitting in my obstetrician's office, signing the paperwork that designated me as the single parent of record.
I didn’t put a father on the form. I left the line blank. The receptionist asked me whether I wanted to leave it blank or write ‘unknown’. I asked her what the difference was.
She said, ‘Legally, none.’
I said, ‘blank.’
I haven’t seen Lex Konstantinos in three years.
I’ve read his name in the Globe twice. Once, when his brother got married, in a wedding write-up where Lex was identified as one of the groomsmen and described as the second of four sons of the late Alexandros Konstantinos.
Once in a financial section about a charitable foundation that Konstantinos Shipping had funded for the children of shipyard workers. I haven’t searched his name on the internet. I have a rule about that. The rule has held for thirty-seven months.
Nora is the most beautiful thing I have ever made.
She has my mouth and his eyes.
And I have not told a soul.
? ? ?
The kettle has gone cold.
I look down. The tea has been steeping for nineteen minutes. It’s undrinkable. I pour it down the sink.
My phone buzzes again.
Federal detail at lobby. Lead operative coming up. ETA two minutes.
I check the time, and sigh. Two minutes to go.
I check on Nora again. Still asleep. Brontos is still pinned under her arm. The night light is still on, the small one shaped like a moon that I bought when she was nine months old and has been on every night since.
I close her door.
I go to my own bedroom. I look at the woman in the mirror. Hair up. Cardigan. The face of a woman who’s been told someone wants her dead and is responding by making tea. I take the cardigan off. I put on a different one for no reason.
There’s a knock at the door.
I walk to it. I look through the peephole. I see a man's chest in a dark coat. I cannot see his face. I open the door without taking the chain off, the way a federal protective detail had taught me to do, the same way I have done seven times over the last few weeks.
And then I look up.