Chapter 12 #2
He does it the way he does everything physical, without making a sound.
His thumb leaves the side of my grip. His right hand leaves my right hand.
His left hand leaves my forearm. His chest leaves my back.
He steps backward, one step, then a second, the heat of him retracting from my spine in a slow gradient that goes cold against the place where he had been.
He’s six feet behind me.
He says, in a voice that is dry and rough. "Good. Try again."
I try again. I get the grip right. He doesn’t come back behind me. He stands six feet away from the table and gives me corrections in words for the rest of the lesson, and his voice doesn’t return to the teaching register, and we both know it.
The lesson ends at 11:06.
The lesson is over. My body did not get the memo.
I am standing in his dining room with my pulse still up and my skin still lit, and the ache that started low in my belly has spread, in the last twenty minutes, into a heavy, wet throb between my thighs that no amount of standing very still is going to talk down.
He wound me tight for forty minutes and never once did what his body was so clearly asking to do, and now the wanting has nowhere to go.
It just sits in me, hot and unspent. I have to act like a woman who has learned to clear a Glock, and not a woman who is, right now, embarrassingly and achingly ready for the man putting it in the safe.
I put the Glock on the table. He clears it. He picks it up. He put it in the safe in the dining room cabinet that I had not known was a safe until this morning.
"You are going to be fine with a weapon if you need one."
I set it down with both hands, the way he taught me, and I do not look at him. "I do not want to need one."
"I know."
He turns and walks out of the dining room. He doesn’t look back at me.
? ? ?
Petrov calls Lex at 11:41.
I’m at the kitchen island with a cup of tea I made myself, working on the wheat-motif trademark dispute that has stopped being interesting and become, in the last thirty minutes, a thing I am pretending to focus on.
Lex is across the room at the dining table.
The phone rings. Lex picks up. Lex listens for ninety seconds.
Lex says, “Thank you,” and hangs up. He looks at me. "Maeve?"
"Yes?"
"A vehicle has circled the block four times in the last six hours."
I set the tea down. "What kind of vehicle?"
"Black sedan. New plates. Two men inside. They have not stopped. They have not parked. They have not photographed the building. They have circled. They want us to know they are circling."
"Nikolai?"
"Probably. The plates do not trace to a known operator. The pattern is consistent with surveillance escalation, which is what a strategist does when he’s letting the target know he’s still in the picture without yet committing to a move."
"Should we move?"
"Not yet. The brownstone is harder to breach than what we would relocate to in twelve hours. We hold position. Petrov is doubling the perimeter and adding a second forward team. They will be visible. The intent is to make the next probe more expensive than the first."
I nod. I pick up the tea. I drink the tea.
The tea is the right temperature. The tea is the temperature of the tea I am drinking in a kitchen where I am being told my daughter is being circled by a black sedan, and I am drinking it without my hand shaking, because I am Maeve Callahan and I am not going to give a Bratva strategist the satisfaction of watching me spill tea.
I swallow a mouthful. "When does Nora get back from daycare?"
"She’s on her way. Two cars. She’ll be in the foyer in nine minutes."
"All right."
"They are not going to get to her."
It is the third time he’s said this to me since we reconnected.
The first was at the door of my apartment.
The second was in my kitchen, the morning we evacuated.
This is the third. Each time the voice is the same.
The voice is the flat killing-floor voice he’s been using since I walked across a Greek consulate three years ago and asked him about the music.
I believe him. I have always believed him. The belief is no longer in question at this point.
? ? ?
Petrov drops the box at the front door at 12:04.
He doesn’t come in. He doesn’t, in any of the operations he’s run for me in twenty-one days, come further than the foyer when he’s on a delivery, because he’s been told by Lex that the brownstone is mine and Nora's and his entry is by invitation.
He sets the box on the foyer floor. He says, in his quiet Russian-accented voice, "Mrs. Callahan.
Three books. Mug. Throw. Plant in a pot, wrapped in newsprint. The list is complete."
"Thank you, Petrov."
"Welcome."
He goes.
I kneel down by the box. I open it.
Three books, on top of the rest. The blue-spined hardcover Pride and Prejudice.
The small paperback Suttree. And a children's book Nora has chosen by photograph, which turns out to be a board book about a small bear who is afraid of the dark, which is a book she’s not asked for in nine months, but which she selected this morning, possibly because she’s decided that the brownstone is a different kind of dark.
I sit on the foyer floor with the bear book in my lap for a moment.
She knew. She knew which book she would need before she had been at the brownstone for one night.
She made the calculation in the small, careful way she makes all of her calculations, and she chose, from a photograph of her bookshelf, the one that had a small bear in it who was afraid, because she’s been afraid for weeks and has not said so and has decided, instead, to bring along a friend who has been afraid before her.
My almost-three-year-old has been doing emotional logistics for herself in silence.
I love her so much that I cannot breathe for a second.
It is not the deflected love of a woman who is too tired to feel.
It is the actual love. The kind I have been carrying since the first time she rolled over, since the first time she said ‘Mama,’ since the morning two weeks ago when she came down the stairs of this strange house with Brontos under her arm and accepted Lex Konstantinos at her kitchen island with the deliberate composure of a girl who had decided, in the night, that she was going to be all right.
She’s going to be all right.
I am going to make sure of it.
I set the bear book on top of the cardboard, gently.
Then I pick up the Pride and Prejudice. The cover is the same cover it has had since my mother gave it to me on my twelfth birthday. The blue is the blue of a dress my mother wore in 1989 in a photograph I have on my dresser. The book is heavier than I remember.
I set it on the foyer table.
Lex is in the doorway of the kitchen, watching me. "What is that one?"
"Pride and Prejudice. My mother gave it to me when I was twelve."
"Have you read it recently?"
I don’t look at him. "Not in three years.”
He hums, "All right."
Then the front door opens, and Nora comes through it with Petrov's secondary at her side and Brontos under one arm, and the foyer becomes a foyer with a small girl in it, and the book stays on the table where I have set it, and the box stays open on the floor, and the morning is over.