Chapter 8
Maeve
The Rhythm
By the third day, we have a rhythm.
The rhythm is not the rhythm of a romance.
I want to be very clear about this with myself, because the man across the kitchen island from me is the man who made me a mother three years ago in a hotel room, and I walked away.
The rhythm we have established in his Brookline brownstone is the rhythm of two adults running parallel operations in service of a small girl who has decided, in a little over a day, that the man making her cereal is acceptable.
The rhythm goes like this.
Lex wakes up at 5:00. I never see him waking up.
I know he wakes up at 5:00 because by the time I come downstairs at 6:15, the coffee has been on for an hour, the morning newspaper is on the kitchen island, folded to the section he’s decided I will want, and there is a small list in his handwriting on a sticky note attached to the newspaper detailing the three security checks Petrov has completed since midnight.
The list is for me. For my sanity. It is the briefing he agreed to deliver before action and not after, because I asked for that on the first day, and he has not failed it once.
Nora comes down at 6:22. Always 6:22. The variance is two minutes either side.
I do not know how Lex knows this; he simply has the bowl out by 6:15.
The cereal is the wheat squares. The bowl is the yellow-flowered one.
The spoon goes in for the principle of it all.
He doesn’t crouch. He doesn’t pick her up.
He doesn’t call her sweetheart. He calls her Nora when he speaks to her directly and Bug only when he’s repeating a word she’s used.
Nora calls him Lex.
She’s called him Lex from the moment she met him, and she hasn’t asked who he is, because she’s almost three, and a grown-up at the dining table is not a question to her.
He’s just part of the room now. The asking will come later, when she’s older, and I am not ready for later.
I keep waiting to feel relieved that it hasn’t come yet. The waiting keeps me up at night.
After breakfast, I work.
This is the second piece of the rhythm. I am still an attorney.
I have a wheat-motif trademark dispute that has not been placed in federal protective custody.
I have a partner in Cambridge sending me drafts to review and a paralegal in the office who has been told I am working remotely on a family matter and who has, accordingly, sent me twice the work I usually do because she assumes a family matter is an exaggeration.
I work at the kitchen island. Lex works at the dining table in the next room.
He’s cleared the dining table and laid out three federal briefs, a notebook, and a phone that he uses only to talk to Petrov.
The dining table is fifteen feet from the kitchen island.
He can see me. I can see him. We are in each other's eyeline for six hours of the day.
We work, and we do not speak. It feels like the silence of two people who have agreed not to speak about what they are thinking.
Nora plays.
Nora plays in the living room with Brontos and a small set of magnetic blocks Petrov produced on the second day.
She plays the way an almost-three-year-old plays: in short stretches, fifteen minutes at the most, never out of my sight, breaking off to come check on me at the kitchen island twice an hour and on Lex at the dining table once an hour.
She hasn’t asked Lex to play with her. I don’t think she will yet. She’s decided he’s a person who works at the dining table, the way her mother works at the kitchen island, and she’s slotted him into the schedule between snack and nap.
Lunch is at twelve. Lex makes it. He learned on the second day that Nora eats turkey on whole-wheat bread with the crusts cut off and an apple sliced into eight pieces with the skin on.
He didn’t ask Nora. He asked me. Then he prepared it. Then he set it on the kitchen island. Then he stepped back so I could serve it to her.
This is the fourth piece of the rhythm. He never crosses the lines I drew on the first day.
He’s not picked her up. He’s not entered her room without me.
He’s not introduced himself as anything other than Lex.
In three days, he hasn’t made any move that would require me to remind him of any term of the contract.
It is, quietly, doing something to me.
? ? ?
Petrov flags a name on Friday morning.
Lex is at the dining table. Petrov has come in the back door, with the small notebook he carries everywhere. He sits down across from Lex. He puts a piece of paper on the table between them.
I am at the kitchen island about fifteen feet from the dining table.
I am not supposed to be hearing them. I have been told, in the structure of our days, that operational briefings are conducted at the dining table, and the kitchen island is the wall.
I have agreed to this. In three days, I have kept the wall.
I keep the wall now. My eyes stay on the laptop. My head stays still. I do, however, hear the name Petrov has spoken.
"Maksim Orlov."
Lex doesn’t react. Lex reads the paper. Lex says, "When?"
"Two nights ago. He moved through Logan on a Cyprus passport. He’s been in the city since Wednesday morning. Surveillance picked him up at a Newton coffee shop on Beacon Street at eleven this morning."
"Range to here?"
"Four miles. Standard urban screen. He’s not made the brownstone. He’s not, at present, looking for the brownstone. Right now, he is having coffee."
“He’s standing. On foot.”
"Two layers between us."
Lex nods once. Lex closes the notebook. Lex says, "Continue surveillance. Do not engage. I want eyes on him for forty-eight hours minimum."
Petrov leaves the way he came in.
My head stays down. It stays down for another few minutes after Petrov is gone, because I have spent three days holding the wall, and I am not going to break it now over a name. But the name has gone into my memory, and I won’t forget it.
Maksim Orlov
Who he is, what he does. I have no idea. I know, however, that the name caused Lex to close a notebook and sit very still for half a second before he said ‘when,’ and I know that Lex Konstantinos is not a man who needs half a second.
I also know that the half-second was not the kind of half-second a man takes when a name is unexpected. It was the kind of half-second a man takes when a name is expected and has finally arrived.
I filed that, too.
The question stays unasked that night. It stays unasked the next morning.
I have spent three years building my own column in my own spreadsheet about the man who is currently sleeping ten feet from my daughter, and I have learned that the things I file do not need to be opened on the day I file them.
I go back to my wheat-motif trademark dispute.
I file the name.
? ? ?
At 7:30 that night, Nora is in the bath.
"Mama," she says.
"Yes?"
"Can Lex read it?"
I look at her. Her face is small and serious.
She’s two years and ten months old, and she has, in the small amount of time she’s known him, decided this— without consulting me, or him.
She’s decided it the way she decides everything.
She’s thought about it, arrived at a conclusion, and is reporting it.
"Why?" I ask, carefully.
She thinks about it. "Because his voice is good for it."
I look at her. I look at the book in her hands. I look at the door of her room, which is six feet from the desk in the small office where Lex is on the phone.
"All right," I say. "I will go ask him."
"Okay."
She arranges Brontos. She arranges her blanket. She prepares for the bedtime story the way she prepares for anything, with a small ceremony.
I close her door and go down the hall, where I knock on the door of the small office.
"Lex," I call out.
"Yes, Maeve?”
"Nora has asked if you will read her bedtime story tonight."
There is a pause on the other side of the door. The pause lasts several seconds, followed by a “Ok.”
"Are you sure?"
"She’s sure."
There is another brief pause. Then he opens the door.