Chapter 12
Maeve
The Case File
The list is the things from my apartment.
I have been making it for two days. I have made it on the back of a legal pad, with the careful precision of an attorney who is itemizing what she’s lost in a settlement, and I have given it to Petrov this morning because Lex has decided, with the agreement of three Konstantinos brothers and one Walsh patriarch, that I am not going back to the Brookline apartment for the duration of this protective custody.
The apartment will be packed by Petrov's team.
Lex's team. Mine, possibly. The pronouns are getting blurry.
Nikolai’s note said Friday. Friday is almost upon us now, and I still do not know what “you have until Friday” is meant to be — a deadline for something he will do, or something he expects of me, or only his way of putting a date on my life.
So I make lists. A list is something a person can finish. Very little else is, right now.
"Books," Petrov reads. "You have written here three books."
"Yes."
"Specific books."
"Yes."
He waits, his brows raised.
"The Pride and Prejudice on the third shelf, hardcover, blue spine. The Cormac McCarthy on the second shelf, the small paperback of Suttree. And whichever of the children's books Nora picks if you bring her a photograph of the shelf and let her choose."
"All right."
"Petrov?"
"Yes."
"The basil plant in the kitchen window. It is dead. It is supposed to be dead. Do not water it. Do not throw it out. I will replace it when this is over."
Petrov writes ‘do not water dead plant ‘on the list. He does it without changing his expression. He seems like a capable man, and he’s the kind of capable who writes things down without commentary.
"Anything else?" he says.
"The mug on the counter. The blue one with the chip. Bring that."
"Yes."
"The throw on the back of the couch. The gray one. Nora sleeps with it sometimes."
"Yes."
"That is everything."
Petrov nods. Petrov leaves. The list goes with him.
He’s going to my apartment with a four-man team to box up the contents of my life, and he’s going to do it in a way that is tactically clean and emotionally invisible, and I am not going to think about the fact that the man I used to make tea for in this kitchen is now sending another man to retrieve my mug for me.
? ? ?
Lex is in the dining room at 10:15. He’s cleared the table. He’s put a Glock on it. He’s a second Glock in a holster on his hip that I have not seen him wear inside the house, which means he’s put it on for me, and I am going to register this and decide what to do with the registration later.
Nora is at daycare. Petrov's secondary team has driven her, with two cars and an itinerary I was given a copy of at 7:00 this morning. She’ll be back at 12:15.
"Maeve," Lex says.
"Yes."
"You are going to learn how to clear a weapon."
"I know how to clear a weapon. I shot at a range twice in college. I am not a complete idiot."
"You are going to learn how to clear a weapon. The version where you are not a college student at a range. The version where there is one between you and the door of your daughter's bedroom."
"All right."
He hands me the Glock. He does it the way a man hands a knife to another man in a kitchen: grip-first, with the muzzle aimed at the floor between us, and his hand coming away from the slide before mine has fully closed on the frame. The motion is one continuous transfer of trust.
"It is unloaded," he says.
"I assumed."
"Verify."
I drop the magazine. I rack the slide. The chamber is clear. I lock it back.
"Good," he says.
It is the first time he’s said ‘good’ to me in this house. It is one syllable. This is the moment.
I am going to think about this for the rest of the morning, whether I want to or not.
"Stand," he says.
I stand. He moves the chair I was sitting in away from the table. He sets it against the wall. The dining room is now a clear floor between me and the table, and the geometry of what is about to happen reorganizes itself in my mind before he’s finished setting the chair down.
"I am going to stand behind you," he says, in the flat voice he uses for instructions, with no inflection.
"I am going to put my arms around you to correct your stance and your grip. I am going to do this because that is how the lesson is taught. If at any point you want me to step back, you say ‘step back,’ and I step back. Do you understand?”
"Yes."
"Tell me you understand."
"I understand. Step back means step back."
"Good."
He moves behind me but doesn’t touch me.
He’s six inches behind me. Maybe four. The heat is coming off him through his shirt and through my cardigan and through the small column of November air between us, and the column of air has gone the temperature of his body, and his body is the temperature of a man who has been running close to red since he walked into my apartment and is, this morning, holding it in.
I can feel him hold it in. I can feel it the way you feel a generator in the next room.
Then I smell him.
Bergamot. Leather. Smoke from a cigar he’s not smoked recently, but which lives in the wool of his jacket.
And underneath all of it, the scent I have not smelled in three years and would have known in any room of any city in any year of my life.
The scent of his actual body. The smell of him.
I had forgotten I knew it. My body had not.
"Bring the weapon up."
I bring the Glock up. Two-handed. Feet shoulder-width. Slight forward lean. Elbows soft. Eyes on the imagined target on the dining room wall.
"Your shoulders are tight."
"I know."
"Drop them."
I cannot drop them. He’s been behind me for thirty-one seconds and my shoulders have set themselves at the level of my ears, and the part of me that knows how to drop my shoulders has been replaced by the part of me that is tracking the heat of his body and the smell of his skin and the small specific way his breathing has changed in the last seven seconds.
His breathing has changed.
The breath at my left ear has slowed.
"Maeve, relax."
His mouth is closer than it was a second ago. I have not turned my head. I do not need to. The breath is at the side of my neck, in the space below my ear, and it is the temperature of breath that has just been inside a man, and I can feel it on the small fine hairs at my nape that have stood up.
"Drop your shoulders."
I drop my shoulders.
It costs me. I do it because Lex Konstantinos has just said to in a voice that is no longer the teaching voice, dropping an octave.
"Good," he says.
Then his hands move.
They come up under my arms. His left hand finds my left forearm.
His right hand finds my right hand on the grip.
The motion is professional. It is the motion of a teacher reaching to correct a grip from behind.
It is also the motion of a man wrapping his arms around a woman, and the two motions are happening at the same time, and there is no way to do one without doing the other, and Lex has decided to do both.
His chest comes up against my back.
Not pressed but touching. The weight of him at my shoulder blades, his sternum just below the ridge between them, the heat of his torso along the entire length of my spine.
The cardigan I am wearing is two layers of merino and it is no protection.
He’s six-three and I am five-four and his chin is at my temple, and his right cheek, tilted to the sight line, brushes the side of my hair.
"Watch your sights," he says, quiet.
My pulse is in my throat. My pulse is in my wrists. My pulse is in places I do not name.
"Maeve. Sights."
I look at the sights.
His thumb finds the side of my grip. He moves my thumb a quarter of an inch with the precise pressure of a man who knows exactly where my thumb belongs. The movement is slow. The movement is professional. The movement is not professional. Both are true. I cannot tell which one his hand believes.
Then he stops moving.
It is a stillness I feel in three places at once. His thumb, on the grip. His chest, against my back. His breath, at my neck.
And then I become aware of him against my lower back.
Not pressed. Present. The heat there is the heat of a body that has answered the body in front of it, and the body in front of it is mine, and the body of Lex Konstantinos has decided what it has decided despite forty minutes of teaching-floor discipline, and I am feeling the decision through two layers of merino and one layer of his trousers.
I am, very specifically, not moving.
Then I hear it.
It is the smallest sound a man can make.
The catch of an exhale that didn’t finish, the breath he was about to release stopping at the back of his throat because he’s just remembered there is something he’s not allowed to do with it.
Then he swallows. The motion is at the side of my neck, where his throat is, and I feel the swallow against my skin the way I feel the sound of it in the fine bones behind my ear.
If I move backward, I close the distance.
If I move forward, I lose the support of his chest at my back, which is the only thing keeping my legs under me, because my legs are not under me anymore. They have gone soft at the knees.
His mouth, at my ear, says one word. "Breathe."
I breathe. He breathes.
He takes it slowly. He takes it into a chest pressed against my back so that I feel the lift of his ribs against my spine, and the lift expands me forward by a quarter of an inch, and then the breath leaves him and I come back, and we have just done a single shared breath cycle in the dining room of his brownstone with a Glock pointed at the wall and his body around mine and his thumb on my thumb and his lips two inches from the side of my neck.
It is more intimate than the night I made our daughter.
Lex breaks first.