Chapter 26
Maeve
What It Costs
Lex tells me everything.
He doesn’t soften the telling.
I have asked him not to soften the telling, and he’s decided to give me what I asked for.
He tells me about the moment in the holding cell when he thought of Nora's bath, and about Anya not getting a thousand more baths, and about the architecture of what Andreev did.
He tells me about sitting back down. He tells me about the funding for Anya's treatment from the Konstantinos foundation, untraceable, permanent.
He tells me about Petrov saying, ‘Your father would be proud.’ He tells me about driving home.
He tells it all in his voice. The flat operational voice.
I listen.
When he finishes, I am quiet for a long second. I am sitting on the edge of the desk in the small office. He’s standing in front of me. The morning light is coming through the small window over my left shoulder.
Then I say, "You were going to kill him."
"Yes."
"You didn't?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I have a daughter now. The man I was three weeks ago would have killed him. The man I am now is not sure that is the right thing."
I stand up.
I walk around the desk. He’s standing in the middle of the small office in his coat, the coat with the wrong sleeve from yesterday that he’s not bothered to change because he came home and went to me. I stop in front of him. The space between us is six inches.
"You changed."
He goes still.
"You changed," I say. "I have known a lot of men. I have not seen one of them change."
"Maeve."
"I want you to know I see it."
He pulls me to him. He uses the good arm.
The bandaged arm goes around me carefully.
He presses his face into the top of my hair, and he holds me there, and we do not speak for a long time.
The sound in the room is the sound of his breathing, which is the breathing of a man who has been holding something for the last fifteen years and is allowing himself, in this small office in this small house, to let it out.
After a long time he says, into my hair, "I didn’t know I was capable of that."
"Of what?"
"Of choosing the harder thing."
"I know," I say. "I knew before you did."
? ? ?
Eleni arrives at 11:47 AM.
She’s not seen Nora since the kidnapping.
She’s been asleep at her own apartment with the Konstantinos doctor next door for two days, on the orders of Theodoros, who has been watching her blood pressure and her sleep .
She’s called the brownstone every two hours.
She’s not asked to come over until this morning.
She knows the shape of how a Greek family puts itself back together after a breach, and the shape requires patience.
She rings the bell.
Lex opens the door.
Eleni walks into the foyer in a navy coat I have not seen before, the coat she wears when she’s not in mourning but is wearing the color anyway because the day requires it.
She’s wearing small gold earrings. Her hair is in the bun.
The bandage at her temple has been replaced with a smaller one.
She looks like the version of Eleni I met four days ago, only the version I am seeing now is the version that has been through three days that have aged her in a way her body is not going to come back from in a hurry.
She looks at Lex.
She looks at me behind him.
Then she says, in English, in a voice that is the voice of a Greek mother holding herself together by an accumulated lifetime of holding herself together, "Where is she."
Nora is in the living room with the crayons.
Lex steps aside.
Eleni walks past us. She crosses the foyer and the dining room and stops at the threshold of the living room.
She doesn’t enter immediately. She stands in the doorway and looks at her almost-three-year-old granddaughter on the carpet with the crayons spread out in front of her, and the granddaughter looks up, and the granddaughter says, "‘Yia-yia.’"
Eleni walks across the room.
She drops to her knees beside Nora. The drop is harder than it was four days ago because it has been four days and Eleni's body has been through a thing. She doesn’t let the harder show on her face. She says, "Hello, ‘koukla mou.’"
Nora studies Eleni's face.
She says, "‘Yia-yia,’ are you crying."
Eleni's eyes are very wet.
"A little," she says.
"Don't cry," Nora says, in the quiet, fierce diplomacy of a child telling a grown-up that the crying is not necessary. "I'm okay. Brontos says don't cry."
Eleni laughs. The laugh is wet. The laugh comes out of her like a thing that has been waiting to be allowed out for three days. Eleni takes Brontos from Nora and holds him against her chest the way she held him the first time. She says, "Tell Brontos I am very glad to see him."
"Brontos says he’s also very glad."
"Good."
Eleni holds her granddaughter on the carpet for a long time.
I stand in the doorway with Lex.
I am not going to interrupt the reunion. The reunion is theirs.
? ? ?
Nico arrives at 1:30 PM with Siobhan and Sofia.
Sofia is six months old. She’s in a small green knit hat and a snowsuit Siobhan is in the process of unzipping in the foyer.
Siobhan greets me with a kiss on the cheek.
She has the competence of a woman who has navigated the Konstantinos family for three years and is now navigating it with a baby in one arm.
Nico is behind her in his coat. He’s holding the diaper bag.
The Konstantinos family arrives the way the Konstantinos family arrives: in shifts and with provisions.
Sofia goes into Eleni's arms.
Eleni, who has just spent forty minutes on a carpet with her older granddaughter, goes through the same ritual with the younger one in a different register.
Sofia is six months and is eating solids and is currently drooling on Eleni's coat. Eleni doesn’t care.
She walks Sofia into the living room cooing at her in Greek.
Nico and Lex stand in the foyer.
Then Cormac arrives.
Then Declan.
Then, at 2:14 PM, the doorbell rings again, and a man I have not met before is at the door.
He’s in an Aer Lingus carry-on bag and a black coat.
He’s forty-one years old. He’s the same dark hair Lex has, only with more silver.
He’s the same nose. The eyes are the wrong color.
His are gray blue. He’stHe’s allertaller than Lex by an inch.
His face is the face of a man who has just finished a transatlantic flight and a Boston cab ride and has come straight from Logan.
"Ronan," Lex says.
"Lex."
They embrace. They embrace the way Greek and Irish brothers-in-law embrace: briefly and with the contained, fierce weight of a thing they have been carrying for forty-eight hours.
Ronan turns to me.
"Maeve."
"Ronan."
"Cormac has told me about you."
"Cormac talks more than he should."
"He does. It runs in our family."
Then Ronan crouches. Nora has come to the doorway of the living room to see who is at the front door, and Ronan crouches at her eye level the way Cormac crouched at her eye level seventeen days ago.
He’s, I am realizing, done this before. There are three years of small Konstantinos cousins he’s crouched for in Galway when they have come to visit my mother-in-law's mother.
"You must be Nora," Ronan says.
"I am."
"I am your Uncle Ronan."
Nora considers this. She looks at Lex. Lex nods.
"I have a lot of uncles," Nora says.
"You do. You have one more than you had this morning."
"Okay."
She offers Ronan Brontos. Ronan takes Brontos with the small ceremonial seriousness of a man being introduced to his niece's most important friend, and Ronan says, "He’sa"He’s a fine elephant."
"He’s lived an interesting life."
"I can see that."
And Ronan O'Brien, the brother who doesn’t come to American problems, has just met his niece in a brownstone in Brookline at 2:14 PM on a Thursday in November.
? ? ?
Finn arrives at 2:31 PM.
He comes in behind Cormac without ceremony.
He’s the youngest O'Brien, slim, sharp-eyed, in a black coat that looks expensive in the way clothes look expensive on men who have decided not to draw attention to it. The hand he extends to me is missing the index finger up to the second knuckle. The remaining four fingers grip my hand like he’s been shaking hands with one fewer finger for long enough that he’s stopped accommodating for it.
"Mrs. Konstantinos."
"Maeve."
"Maeve. Finn O'Brien. I would have come yesterday but I was in New York closing a thing."
"Cormac told me about you."
Finn's eyes do something small, specific, and quick. Not surprise. Recognition. He says, "He told you about the finger."
"He told me you were taken three years ago. He didn’t give me details."
"There are not many. The Bratva took me on a Tuesday and Lex got me out on a Thursday and I came home with one fewer finger than I left with.
The story is not interesting. The point is that we have done this before.
The Konstantinos and the O'Brien families.
We have done the ‘bringing-people-back’ before, and we are good at it, and your daughter was never going to stay where they put her. "
I look at him.
"Thank you, Finn."
"You do not have to thank me. I didn’t pull her out of the car."
"You came."
"I am family."
He says it the way Cormac says things, only quieter, only with the four-finger hand still in mine.
Then he releases my hand, walks past me into the living room where his niece is currently introducing his older brother Ronan to a one-eyed elephant, and sits down on the floor beside Cormac to wait his turn for an introduction.
Nora notices the missing finger immediately. Of course she does. She’s a child.
"Where did your finger go."
Finn looks at Lex across the room. Lex looks back. Some Greek Irish telegraph of ‘what do we tell her’ passes between them, and Lex gives the smallest nod, and Finn turns back to Nora.
"It got hurt a long time ago. Before you were born. The doctor took it because it was sick. The rest of my hand is fine."
"Does it hurt."
"Not anymore. It used to."
"Brontos has a hurt trunk."
"Brontos and I have a lot in common."
Nora considers Finn for a long second with the gravity she brings to all important decisions. Then she nods, satisfied, and says, "You are Uncle Finn."
"I am."
"You are the fourth one."
"I am."
"Okay."
She returns to teaching Ronan how Brontos says hello. Finn watches her for a moment. Then he turns to me at the doorway and says, very quietly, "Lex did the right thing."
"With Andreev."
"With all of it."
Then he goes back to listening to his niece.
? ? ?
Nico finds Lex and me in the kitchen at 3:47 PM.
Nora is in the living room with five uncles around her, one of them Konstantinos and four of them O'Brien, plus Sofia in Eleni's arms, and Cormac is on the floor showing Nora how to make Brontos and a small giraffe Cormac has produced from a paper bag say hello to each other in Irish.
Lex and I have been allowed, by silent Greek family agreement, to step away to the kitchen for ten minutes.
Nico sits down at the kitchen island.
"You did good," he says.
"I should have caught Andreev sooner."
"You caught him at all. The federal case will hold. The Sokolov thread is in Petrov's hands now. We will work it."
Lex nods.
Nico is quiet for a long second. Then he says, "Lex. About the brother thing. About the lying. We are past it. I want you to know that."
Lex's throat does what it does when he’s being given something he cannot ask for. He says, "Thank you, Nico."
"Don't thank me. Just don't do it again."
"I won't."
Nico looks at me.
"Maeve."
"Yes."
"Welcome to the family."
I hold his eyes for one full second.
"Thank you, Nico."
They leave at 5:30 PM.
Eleni stays with Theodoros until 6:00 PM and then goes home with him. Ronan and Finn go with Cormac to the O'Brien apartment in Brookline. Declan returns to Konstantinos security rotations. The brownstone is quiet.
I take a bath.
Lex puts Nora to bed.
? ? ?
Lex tells me about the bedtime beat afterward.
I am in the kitchen in pajamas. He comes down the stairs and stands in the doorway of the kitchen and tells me, in his flat voice, that Nora asked him while he was reading her ‘Goodnight Moon’ whether the bad man was scared. And whether Lex made him scared. And whether the answer was yes.
"What did you tell her?" I ask.
"I told her yes."
"What did she say."
"She said ‘good.’"
I close my eyes for half a second. I open them.
"Lex."
"Yes."
"You answered her honestly."
"I made a promise to myself in the doorway of her bedroom while she was falling asleep. I am not going to lie to her. About what I am. Ever. She’s going to know what I am someday and she’s going to ask me harder questions than the one she asked tonight. I am going to answer them."
I cross the kitchen. I take his face in my hands. I kiss him. The kiss is brief. The kiss is the kiss of a woman who has just heard her husband make a vow she didn’t know she was waiting for him to make.
"Good," I say.
"Good."
? ? ?
Later. The couch. Lex with his arm around me. The bandaged arm. The good one. He’s done a thing today and he’s processing it and he’s letting me sit with him while he processes it.
"How long until grand jury?" I say.
"Fifty days."
"Okay."
He’s quiet for a long minute.
Then he says, "Maeve."
"Yes."
"I want you to think about something between now and then."
"What."
"After grand jury. After this is done. I want to ask you something. I am not going to ask you now because I do not want you to answer because of what we just survived. I want you to answer because of what we want."
I look at him.
"So I am telling you," he says, "that it is coming. Think about it."
I have known what he’s going to ask since I climbed into his lap in the safe house with bandage scissors falling from my fingers.
I am, in this room, the woman who has been waiting for him to tell me the question is coming, and now he has, and I am going to give him the answer he’s earned, which is the answer of a woman who is not going to make him wait fifty days.
But I do not give him the answer tonight.
Tonight I give him the small, specific, narrow answer he’s asked for, which is the acknowledgment that the question is coming.
I say, "Okay."
He pulls me closer.
Neither of us speaks.
The fire in the small grate is the only sound in the room.