Chapter 4
Maeve
The Negotiation
He sets the tea down in front of me on the low table at four minutes exactly.
It is not too strong. It is not too weak.
He's used the right amount of milk and no sugar, which I told him three years ago in a hotel room while he was making coffee from a small machine that only made one cup at a time.
He remembered it. A man I spent one night with, three years and one lifetime ago, remembered how I take my tea, and the remembering lands somewhere under my ribs and sits there, warm and unwelcome, because I do not have room tonight for warm and I cannot afford unwelcome.
I am not going to think about it right now.
I have built an entire personality over the last three years around not thinking about it right now.
"Sit down," I say.
He sits.
I take a long pull of the tea. It scalds the roof of my mouth a little, which is good, because the small physical pain is the only thing keeping me located in my own body.
I keep wanting to leave it. I keep feeling the urge to float up to the ceiling and watch this from a safe distance, the way you do when something in front of you is too big to stand inside of, and the thing in front of you is this: the man on the couch across from me is the father of my child.
The man on the couch across from me is going to be sleeping in this apartment for the foreseeable future.
The man on the couch across from me is, by every reasonable accounting, the most dangerous person who has ever been in this living room, and the most dangerous part is not the gun I am certain he is carrying.
It is that some animal part of me, the part that has not slept in weeks, the part that is so tired of being the only wall between my daughter and the dark, looked at him in my doorway tonight and felt, for one disgraceful second, relief.
I am going to negotiate the terms of his presence here as if that second never happened.
"Terms," I say.
He folds his hands. "Go ahead."
"When you're on, you sleep on this couch.
When you're not, Petrov's people hold this apartment, and nobody rotates without me knowing.
You do not enter Nora's bedroom unless I'm with you or there's an active threat.
You do not introduce yourself to her as anything other than a friend who is staying with us for a little while. "
"Agreed."
"You work around her schedule, not over it. She goes to daycare four mornings a week. She naps from 1:00 to 2:30. She eats dinner at 6:00, bathes at 6:45, and goes to bed at 7:30. Bedtime is a hard line. You will not, under any circumstances, do anything that disrupts bedtime."
He doesn't say it this time. He takes out a small notebook and writes it down — the nap, the bath, the bedtime — the way a man records something he intends to be held to.
I do not know what to do with the fact that he is treating the architecture of my daughter's ordinary little day like an operation worth his handwriting.
"You brief me on threats as they come in. Not around her. Not over her head. Not in her hearing. Me, in this room, when she's asleep or out."
"Understood."
"You will not, at any point, refer to her as your daughter in this apartment. Not when she's here. Not when she's not. We will revisit that. After. Not now."
He goes quiet for the first time since he sat down. Half a second, no more. I feel that half-second the way you feel a held breath in a room. Then: "Agreed." Whatever it cost him to say it, he does not let me see the bill.
"You agree fast."
"I told you. I'm agreeing at the speed of a man who knows the woman he's agreeing with."
I look at him. He's sitting on my couch in a dark suit, drinking tea, agreeing to be my daughter's bodyguard and her father in the same breath. His face gives me nothing. There's something under it. I just can't read it yet.
Three years have done something to him.
He's taller than I remember, which is impossible.
He has to be the same height. He's gained the kind of presence that fills a room without him doing anything to fill it, the kind of presence I now recognize as the cost of years of being a brother's enforcer in a city where men get killed in parking garages.
There's silver at his temples that wasn't there before.
The scar at the corner of his mouth is still there, a small comma.
There's a new scar on the back of his right hand that I do not recognize, a thin line running from his thumb to his wrist. His hair is shorter.
His eyes are the same gold I have spent years pretending I didn't remember and now have to remember accurately, because the small body in the room down the hall has them too.
That is the part I keep flinching away from. Every time I look at his eyes, I am looking at my daughter's eyes, and every time I look at my daughter's eyes, I have been, for three years, looking at his.
"My turn," he says.
"Your turn."
"I need a logistical brief on Nora. Every routine. Every person who has access to her. Names of teachers. Phone numbers of any caregiver. Names of any father figure she's known."
The last clause hits me in the sternum. He says it without inflection, the way you read the last item off a list, but I have spent three years being the only name on every line of that list, and hearing him ask the question costs me a breath I don’t let him hear me take.
He's asking the question he needs the honest answer to.
I look at him. He looks at me. We are doing something neither of us has language for yet.
"There is no father figure," I say, and I keep my voice as level as I can because if it shakes, I am going to lose the next ten minutes.
"There has never been one. I have not dated anyone seriously in three years.
There is a daycare teacher named Ms. Fitzgerald and a backup pickup person named Eileen, who is my cousin, and neither of them has been alone in a room with Nora for longer than the legal pickup window allows.
That is the population of adults who have unsupervised access to my daughter. "
It is a very small population. I built it that way on purpose, alone, and saying it out loud to him makes the smallness of it suddenly visible, the smallness of the wall I have been, and I do not look at him while the fact of it settles in the room.
"Eileen is in Boston."
"South Boston. Yes."
"Cormac will know her."
"Cormac knew my mother. We are not going to be using Eileen until the grand jury."
He nods. He pulls a small notebook from his interior breast pocket.
He doesn't write things down so much as record them.
The handwriting is small and very neat. He's left-handed.
I didn't remember that detail, and the not-remembering stings in a way I do not have time to examine — that I let him into my body three years ago and never learned which hand he writes with, because I left before morning.
That was the only way I knew to keep something for myself.
When he reaches across the table, his shirt cuff rides up.
There's black ink on the inside of his left forearm.
Greek script. Several lines, running from the inside of his wrist toward his elbow.
The lines are tight. The Greek is illegible to me.
The question of when he got it is not a question I am going to ask tonight.
I file the existence of it the way I file every piece of information I have about him tonight — into the column of a spreadsheet I am keeping in my head titled 'Things About the Father of My Daughter I Didn't Know This Morning.
' The spreadsheet is getting long, and the only thing standing between me and the size of what is happening.
"Continue," he says.
"My phone has been compromised twice. Once, two weeks ago, signal interference at the federal building.
Once, last Friday, a number I didn't call appeared in my call log at three nineteen in the morning.
The federal protective detail says the phone is clean now.
They have replaced it twice. I do not believe them.
" I have stopped believing a great many people lately.
It is exhausting, the not-believing. It is its own full-time job, on top of the other full-time jobs, on top of being the only wall.
"Give me the phone."
I take it out of my pocket. I hand it across the table. He turns it off without looking at it. He sets it on the table next to the dinosaur cup.
"You will get a new one in the morning," he says. "Petrov will have a clean device here by eight. Until then, the federal detail can route emergency contact through me. You do not need a phone tonight."
"Lex. You took my phone."
"I took your compromised phone."
"You did it before I said it was okay."
He stops. He looks at me. He's understood what I just said — that taking the phone that fast, however right it was, is the move of a man who handles things without asking the person to whom it belongs.
That his protection has a kind of ownership built into it.
Something moves behind his eyes, there and gone before I can name it.
He sets the phone on the coffee table between us and slides it the last inch toward me with two fingers, deliberate, like a man setting down a weapon he's decided not to need.
"I'm sorry." Even. But his jaw is tight when it's done, and I know the apology cost him something I won't get to see in full.
"You give it back if I ask. You don't act on my behalf without telling me." My hands want to move, so I keep them flat in my lap. I’m afraid that if I let them move, he will see how close I am to the edge of this.