Chapter 6
Maeve
First Morning
She doesn’t wake up. She’s not woken up for a four AM transport since she was eight months old, when I had to take her to an emergency room in Cambridge for a fever that turned out to be roseola.
She slept through the cab ride. She slept through the triage check-in. She woke only when the resident took her temperature, and the cold thermometer touched her forehead; even then, she went back down within ninety seconds.
She sleeps now the way she slept then. Heavily.
Her cheek against my shoulder. Brontos under her arm.
The small purple snow boots are on her feet.
I came into her room at 3:45 and lifted her in her dinosaur pajamas and a fleece blanket because I didn’t want to wake her up to dress her properly.
The snow boots were on the floor next to her bed. Lex put them on her.
Lex put them on her.
Lex, who has not been allowed to touch my daughter, picked her up off the bed at 3:58 while I was zipping a duffel, in order to put her snow boots on her, because she had asked for them yesterday and he had registered that they were her chosen footwear and already decided she was going to be wearing them when she left her home.
I don’t know what to do with the fact that he asked me before he picked her up.
I do not know what to do with the fact that he did it gently, the way I have done it ten thousand times, hands cradling her head, her weight balanced on his forearm.
Who knows whether someone taught him that or whether it is simply in him.
I push the thoughts away. I don’t want to think about this right now.
Petrov is in the front of the SUV. Lex is in the back with us.
The car seat is not mine. It is not one I have ever seen.
It is, somehow, the correct car seat for her age and weight, with the buckles set correctly.
My only guess is that Lex Konstantinos has been preparing for his daughter’s arrival since he saw her age in a briefing folder seven hours ago.
A fact I am not equipped to sit with at 4:00 AM with my daughter asleep in my lap. I’m just glad he had the thought.
"How long is the drive?" I ask.
"Eleven minutes."
Petrov drives like a man who has been driving in abnormal conditions for years.
The SUV doesn’t feel fast, which is the point — Petrov has decided exactly how fast we are allowed to feel.
He runs three yellow lights in a row. He turns left, takes a side street I have never been on, and the GPS mounted on the dashboard is dark. He doesn’t need it.
I look down at Nora. She’s still asleep. Brontos has slipped slightly. I adjust him under her arm. She makes a small, dissatisfied sound and resettles.
I look up. Lex is watching us.
Watching her. Then watching me watch her. He looks away when our eyes meet, which is not embarrassing. It is the discipline of a man who has decided he’s not going to look at his sleeping daughter in a way that is going to make this car ride harder than it needs to be.
"Lex," I say, very quietly so as not to wake Nora. "Thank you for the boots."
He doesn’t answer immediately. The streetlights are coming through the back-seat windows in slow rhythmic intervals. His face goes from light to dark, then back to light. The face is doing what it has been doing all night. Something underneath the not-doing-anything.
"You’re welcome," he says.
Eleven minutes on the dot, and we are at the destination.
? ? ?
The brownstone is on a quiet street in a section of Brookline I have driven past but never had any reason to enter.
The street is lined with brick three-story houses.
The brownstone Petrov turns the SUV into the drive, which is the third on the left.
There is no sign that anyone lives in it.
There is no sign that anyone has lived in it for a long time, which I guess is the point.
Petrov parks in a small, attached garage that closes behind us. Lex gets out first. Lex unloads the duffel. Lex carries the duffel up four steps to a door that doesn’t have a number. He unlocks it. He stands aside and waits for me.
I get out with Nora. I follow him.
Inside is a beautiful foyer,with wood floors.
A coat closet. A staircase. Beyond the foyer, a kitchen on the right and a living room on the left.
The kitchen has been recently stocked. There are bananas in a wooden bowl on the island.
There is a plastic plate with cartoon dinosaurs on it on the counter, the kind of plate sold at Target for under five dollars.
I know because Nora has the same plates at home. She’ll be happy about that.
I look at Lex. "When did you do all this?"
"Yesterday afternoon. Petrov stocked the kitchen."
"You bought a dinosaur plate."
"I asked Petrov to. I told him a small girl was coming. He said he had three nieces."
I turn my eyes away from the dinosaur plate again because if I look at the dinosaur plate again, I am going to start crying.
"Where do we sleep?”
"You and Nora are in the upstairs bedroom. There is one bedroom on this floor. I will be in it. There is a bathroom between the two bedrooms, and the door to the upstairs bedroom can be locked from inside."
"Locked from inside? Why?"
"Yes. The lock is operational. I checked it yesterday. You can lock the door from inside if that is what you need to feel safe."
He’s registered that the woman who walked across a room at the Greek consulate three years ago is now a woman who is going to need to be able to lock a door against him in the night.
Without asking me to confirm it. He’s prepared the locked door.
He’s not, in any of his preparations, made any assumption that I am going to want anything other than complete control over the geography of this house.
"All right," I say.
"I will carry her up. If you want me to."
I look at him. I look at my sleeping daughter. I look at the staircase, which has fourteen steps and a banister and which I cannot, with a duffel and a sleeping toddler, navigate alone without putting at least one of the three of us at risk.
“Ok.” is all I can manage to say.
He takes Nora from me. He does it gently. She doesn’t wake. He carries her up the stairs the way he put on her boots. I follow with the duffel.
In the upstairs bedroom is a queen bed. A small bed beside it, made up for a toddler.
A nightlight already plugged into the wall.
The same shape as the moon nightlight in her room at home.
Not the same nightlight. A new one of the same shape.
Petrov has three nieces and is, apparently, very good at his job.
Lex puts Nora in the small bed. He arranges Brontos under her arm. He pulls a blanket up to her shoulders. He doesn’t pause at the bed for longer than the action requires. He turns and leaves the room.
I sit on the edge of the queen bed. I look at my daughter for a full minute. I count her breaths. Eight. Ten. Twelve.
Then I go downstairs.
? ? ?
Lex is in the kitchen. He’s making coffee. One mug on the counter, set at the spot at the island where I guess I’ll be sitting in the mornings. Not for himself, then. For me.
I sit. He hands me the mug. The coffee is the way I take it, which is black with one sugar.
This is not information he willl find in a federal file.
All I can say at this hour is he figured correctly and I’m thankful for the coffee.
He is, for the second time tonight, going to make me cry, and I am not going to let him.
He takes his suit jacket off.
This is the first time I have seen him without a jacket since the Greek consulate three years ago.
The shirt underneath is white, and it is doing nothing to hide what is under it.
The sleeves are rolled to the elbow. The Greek script on the inside of his left forearm is fully visible in the kitchen light, several lines, the ink very black against olive skin that has not seen much summer in a long time.
And underneath the script, there are forearms — corded, the muscle shifting when he sets the mug down, the kind that come from work and not from a gym, from manual labor and lots of it.
The cotton pulls across his shoulders when he reaches for the sugar, and I can see the shape of him through it, the flat plane of his chest, the way his weight sits low and easy and entirely under his control, the way a loaded gun sits quiet.
I remember that body. My own body remembers it before I give it permission to.
Heat moves through me, low and unhurried, settling behind my navel and sinking lower, and my skin comes awake along my arms and the back of my neck.
My pulse climbs into my throat where I can feel it beat.
My mouth has gone bone dry. There is a tightening, deep and specific, in a place I have not let myself think about in three years, and none of it cares that I am thirty-one and exhausted, that I am his protective detail, that I am the mother of his child.
I did not ask my body to do this. It does it anyway.
He is just a man in a kitchen, sleeves rolled up, making coffee for the woman whose daughter is asleep upstairs. I have a job, a child, and a federal indictment to testify in. I do not need to catalog what the sight of him is doing to the rest of me.
I catalog it anyway. Thoroughly. For the record.
"Lex," I say.
“Yes.” It’s always yes with him. One word, no weather in it.
"Sit."
He sits across from me at the island.
"This was very fast," I say. "All of it.
You arrived seven hours ago. I am in your house.
My daughter is in your guest bedroom. There is a dinosaur plate on your counter.
We have not slept. The ground has not been level under either of us for any of it.
So I want to say something while we are still in the part of this night where we are being honest."
"All right."
"I am not going to fall back into bed with you because you bought my daughter a dinosaur plate and a moon nightlight.
I am not going to soften because you are doing the right things.
I am not, in any way, in the headspace where this is a romance.
We have a contract. You are her father. You are my protective detail.
We are not the people we were three years ago in a hotel room. Are we clear?"
He doesn’t smile. "We are clear."
"All right."
"Maeve?"
“Umm hmm?”
"I was not under the impression we were going to be falling back into bed. I was under the impression I was going to spend the time until the grand jury being the man you needed me to be. That is the only impression I have been operating under since I walked into your apartment."
"All right- glad we’re on the same page then.”
There is a small noise from upstairs. Nora’s waking up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, processing the new geography. We both stop. We both look at the ceiling.
Then we hear her voice. Small. Calm. Curious. The voice of a girl who is not yet three but who is, by every report I have ever filed at her daycare, an unusually composed person.
"Mama?"
I get up to go to her.
"Wait," Lex says.
I stop.
"What does she like for breakfast?”
It takes me a moment to register the question. Then I register the man asking it.
"Cereal," I say. "There is a cereal she likes. The one with the small wheat squares. No milk. Dry, in a bowl, with a spoon she doesn’t use, because she eats the squares with her hands and the spoon is in the bowl for the principle of the thing."
"All right," he says.
He turns toward the cabinet. The cabinet has the cereal she likes in it. Petrov has three nieces, but damn, he is good.
I go upstairs to bring my daughter down to meet her father.