Chapter 11
Lex
Dmitri
The kitchen door opens.
Dimitri doesn’t knock. Dimitri doesn’t announce himself. Dimitri has been let in through the back door by Petrov. I told him to let him in. He walked to the kitchen island without a word and sat on the stool across from mine.
He’s wet. His hair is wet again. He’s walked from the corner again.
He is the only one of them who saw it this morning — the only one who did the math over my daughter’s head and arrived at the answer. Dimitri is not a man who can leave an answer unspoken between us. So he has come back, alone, in the rain, at ten o’clock at night, to make me say it out loud.
"How long have you known?" he says.
I tell him.
I tell him the full version, in a flat operational tone.
He’s asking me about my daughter. I tell him I knew in Nico's office on Tuesday and confirmed again in the kitchen at Maeve’s apartment ten minutes after I walked in.
Finally, Maeve told me in her own kitchen at 12:15 on Wednesday morning. I tell him about the snow boots.
Dimitri listens.
Dimitri doesn’t interrupt. Dimitri does what Dimitri has always done since he was eight years old, and our father caught him stealing a baklava from our mother's tray, which is to absorb information without reacting until he’s decided what to do with it.
"August three years ago," he says.
It is not a question. He’s done the math.
He did the math in the front hall of my brownstone six hours ago, while a small girl in dinosaur pajamas was offering him her stuffed elephant, and he’s been holding the math through forty minutes of briefing, a walk in the rain, and a silent Range Rover ride to the corner of my street.
"Three years ago," I confirm.
"The Boston gala. The hospital fundraiser at the consulate."
"Yes."
"You worked the perimeter that night. I was in Athens. Mama was honored."
"Yes."
"You met her there."
"I met her there."
Dimitri nods once. The nod is the nod of a man who has just slotted the final variable into a calculation he’s been running silently for six hours, and who now has the complete answer.
"Have you held her?” he asks.
"Yes, I carried her to bed and read her bedtime stories.”
"Have you been alone in a room with her?"
"No. I have been in a room with her and her mother. I have not been in a room with her and her mother absent."
"She’s decided you are acceptable?"
"She has."
"Maeve has not."
"Maeve is processing."
Dimitri looks at the bourbon. He doesn’t pour himself one. He’s not had a drink in four years.
Nico had already been here earlier in the week for the briefing I had promised him on the phone. I gave him the threat picture — the contract, the Orlov flag, the architecture going up around the brownstone. I gave him everything operational and nothing else.
He let it sit, because that is what Nico does, and because he trusted that whatever I was keeping, I was keeping for a reason.
"You should tell Nico."
"I will."
"Soon is when?"
I do not answer.
"Lex," he warns me.
"What?."
He presses harder. "Soon is when, Lex?"
"After grand jury. When the threat is closed."
Dimitri looks at me, and then shakes his head. "That is two months from now. That’s not soon."
"Yes, it is."
"You are going to keep her existence from your brother for two months?"
"Yes."
"He’s going to find out."
"He’s going to find out from me. After."
"And if Nikolai gets to her…" His voice trails off.
"Nikolai is not going to get to her."
Dimitri nods. He doesn’t press any further. He stands and puts a hand on my shoulder, which is a thing Dimitri doesn’t do. He leaves it there for one second and then walks out the back door without saying goodbye.
The door closes.
I sit at the kitchen island with a glass of bourbon I am not going to drink, and I do something I have not let myself do in three years.
I let myself remember the gala.
? ? ?
I finish the bourbon by pouring it down the sink. I rinse the glass. I set it upside down on the drying rack. I turn off the kitchen light.
I walk down the hall and stop outside Maeve's door.
I do not, in any way, do anything that would register on the other side as a presence asking for something. I stand in the hallway in the dark for sixty seconds, breathing.
On the other side of that door is the woman I got lost in and never forgot.
On the other side of the door, our daughter is asleep.