Chapter 20
Lex
Mine
She is collapsed against my chest, her breath still ragged, and I am still inside her, and the world has been reduced to the size of this bed in a blacked-out room three floors above a Charlestown street.
She has just told me, into my shoulder, that she would do this again.
Every time. Knowing what is coming. The sentence is in my chest, and it is rearranging the architecture I have carried for fifteen years: the architecture of a man who decided at twenty that he would never be allowed to be loved by a woman who had seen what he was.
The architecture is rearranging in real time.
I have, in my chest, a word.
It arrived in the second between her saying ‘every time’ and the moment her body went over mine.
It came up from a place I have not opened since I was twenty years old, a place under the place where I file the things I do not let myself want, and it is in my chest now, and it is not coming out of my mouth tonight.
The word is ‘mine.’
Not in the way the family means it. Not in the way Nico claimed Siobhan three years ago in front of the assembled families with the fierce ceremony of Greek possession.
Mine the way a man owns the wound that almost killed him and the scar that proves he survived. Mine the way a man owns what he was given three years ago and did not know he had been given, and is being given again tonight, with full knowledge.
She is on me everywhere. Anyone who tries to take her, I will put in the ground.
I know what I feel, but the word is not ready to leave my mouth. When she gets it, she gets the full version, not a thing I gasped out in a safe house with my arm still bleeding under the tape.
Then I say, low, into her hair, the three syllables I said into her hair at the lake house, the three syllables I have said exactly once before in this lifetime, the three syllables that mean what ‘mine’ means in the language I will not yet say to her in English.
"Eísai diki mou."
She doesn’t lift her head. She kisses the side of my throat. The kiss is the same kiss she gave me at the lake house when I said it the first time. The kiss of a woman who has heard a sentence in a language she doesn’t speak and decided, in the moment, to trust it.
This time, the second time, her mouth at my throat says something against my skin.
I cannot make out the word. I do not need to.
Whatever she said, it was the answer.
? ? ?
Later, when our breathing has evened, and the sweat has cooled on us, I find my phone in the coat on the chair and call my mother from the edge of the bed while Maeve pulls my shirt on over her head behind me.
Eleni answers on the first ring. She has been waiting up.
I tell her we are coming back into the city tonight, but that I want Nora to stay with her until morning, under her roof, with two of Cormac’s men in the lobby.
Just in case she accepts, I offer to bring both her and Nora to the Brownstone in the morning.
My mother refuses, saying Nora is asleep in the small bed Eleni keeps made for her.
She also says Nora will not be moved tonight for anyone, including me, and that she will bring her home in the morning.
Then she says, in Greek, that I sound like my father, and she hangs up before I can decide whether that is a kindness or a wound.
? ? ?
Petrov drives us back across the river a little after midnight.
Maeve is beside me in the back seat in the borrowed sweater, the sleeves too long over her hands, her hair still loose from the bed we just left. She does not speak.
Somewhere on the bridge, she reaches across the seat and takes my good hand and laces her fingers through mine, and she holds on for the rest of the drive.
I let her. I have been holding the line of myself together since the rifle round cracked the glass over her head, and her hand around mine grounds me.
The brownstone is dark and warm. Petrov goes through every room before he leaves us at the door. I lock it behind him: the deadbolt, the second deadbolt, the chain I installed last week.
? ? ?
Downstairs in the master bedroom, she has picked out her side of the bed. She lies down facing me. My good arm is under her shoulders. Her cheek is against my chest. The bandaged arm rests across the bedspread on my other side, careful of nothing now, finally.
The brownstone is quiet.
Nora is at Eleni's. Cormac's two extra soldiers are in the lobby of the Beacon Street building. Petrov is downstairs in this building, monitoring the perimeter. The Sig Sauer P226 I am carrying tonight is on the nightstand in arm's reach. The phone is also on the nightstand and eerily silent.
Petrov has not pinged me. The mole is somewhere in this city tonight, and somewhere in this city tonight, a federal employee whose name I have not yet confirmed is finalizing the betrayal he’s not yet executed, and I am tracking exits even now, even with Maeve asleep on my chest in the dark.
She thinks I am relaxed.
She’s wrong. I have not been relaxed in fifteen years. The state I am in is a state I am calling ‘with her.’ A state she’s invented for me by being in a bed with me, the closest thing I am going to get to relaxation in the rest of this lifetime, and I will take it.
She moves slightly against my chest. "Lex."
She’s quiet for a long minute. Her finger traces a line on my chest. The line is the long scar from the knife at twenty-two. She’s traced it before. She traces it again. A deliberate gesture of a woman who has decided that this body is a thing she’s allowed to know.
Then she says, in a different voice: "Lex. I need to ask you something."
The voice has shifted. The voice is the voice she uses for courtrooms, only quieter.
"Yes."
"If I don't make it through grand jury…"
"You will."
"If I don't."
I go very still.
She doesn’t lift her head from my chest. She’s asking the question against my sternum, where she doesn’t have to look at my face.
"I want you to take Nora. I want her with you and your family. Not my mother in Florida. Not my firm friends. You."
"Maeve."
"Promise me."
I have been a man who has made approximately twelve promises in fifteen years. The promises have been to my brothers, to my mother, to my father at his grave, to a woman in Athens at twenty-one I have not seen since, and to my grandmother on the morning she died.
I am about to make a thirteenth.
I think, in the one corner of my brain still functioning at 1:47 AM in a brownstone in Boston, that this promise will outlive every other promise I have ever made because it is the one I will be tested on hardest, and I think also that I am going to keep it, and I think also that the keeping of it will be what makes me the man Maeve has decided to choose.
I say, "I promise."
She closes her eyes against my chest. She breathes once, deep and shaky.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay."
I pull her tighter against me, carefully, because of the bandaged arm. I do it with the good arm. I press my mouth into the top of her head, and I keep it there for a long time.
She falls asleep against my ribs.
I do not sleep.
I have made two promises tonight that I have not yet given names to. The first is the word in my chest I didn’t say out loud. The second is the promise about Nora. The two promises are not the same promise.
They are two halves of the same architecture. The first is the ‘what.’ The second is the ‘if anything happens to me.’ Together, they describe a man who has, in the space of one night, decided to belong to a woman and a child without either of them knowing.
I do not have the English word for what is happening to me.
The Greek word would not be enough either.
I will name it later. I have time.
I have, in this moment, the woman I love asleep on my chest, the daughter I love sleeping at her grandmother's apartment two miles away, and a Sig on the nightstand within arm's reach, and outside the window the city of Boston is doing what it does at four in the morning in November.
Cold and quiet and full of people who do not know we exist.
This is enough. This is enough until the phone rings.
I pick up before the second ring.
"Petrov."
Petrov's voice on the line is the voice I have not heard from Petrov in twenty-two years. The voice is wrong. The voice is the voice of a man who has been in his job long enough to know what he’s calling about and is making the call anyway.
He says one sentence.
"Lex. Eleni's apartment. Now."