Chapter 35
Lex
Agapi Mou
The next evening.
Nora is at my mother's apartment.
She’s been there since 4:00 PM. My mother picked her up.
My mother said, in front of Maeve, that she wanted Nora overnight to make ‘kourabiedes’ for tomorrow's lunch and that she would not take no for an answer. Maeve, who has been in the calm aftermath of grand jury for thirty-six hours and who is wearing a sweater Eleni quietly delivered to the brownstone two days ago, didn’t ask why.
The sweater is dark blue. The neckline is wide.
Maeve's collarbones are exposed, and the small gold chain I gave her on Day thirty-one sits at the dip at the base of her throat, and Maeve has, in the precise way of a wife who has been listening, decided to let the evening happen the way it is happening.
Cormac is in the lobby. Declan is on the sidewalk.
They are not here for security in any operational sense; the threats are dispatched, Karpov is in federal custody, Foley is in federal custody, Reznikov Sr. is in St. Petersburg and not coming.
Cormac and Declan are in the lobby because they want to be near the building when it happens. They asked me yesterday. I said yes.
Nico, Siobhan, Sofia, Stavros, and my mother are at her apartment. They are waiting for my text. The text will read ‘yes’ and nothing else.
Maeve doesn’t know any of this.
? ? ?
I make dinner.
My mother's ‘stifádo,’ the slow-braised beef with pearl onions and red wine and bay leaves and a clove of garlic studded with allspice, the recipe she wrote out for me on an index card in October and which I have been making once a week for two months.
I have been making it the way you practice scales.
The first attempts were tolerable. The current attempt, this evening, is the closest I have come to my mother's version.
The pearl onions are perfect. The wine has reduced correctly.
The meat has fallen apart the way it falls apart when it has been treated correctly for three hours.
Maeve sits at the kitchen island with a glass of red wine.
She watches me work. She’s been watching me cook for two months.
The watching is the settled habit of a wife who has settled that this is one of her favorite things in her life now, which is the husband who is at the stove with a cookbook on the counter and the small frown of concentration he wears when he’s trying to do something correctly.
"What are you making?”
"‘Stifádo.’"
"You made ‘stifádo’ on Tuesday."
"This is a better version."
"You are competing with yourself."
"Yes."
Maeve smiles. Small. Real. She drinks her wine.
The candles I have lit are at the dining table, the kitchen island, the window over the sink, and the small sideboard near the hallway.
There are seven candles in the kitchen and three more in the dining room.
I have been lighting candles since 5:30 PM.
The brownstone is, by 7:14 PM, when I plate the ‘stifádo,’ lit the way my grandmother's apartment in Brookline was lit on Sunday evenings in the 1990s, with the steady warmth of a house that has been deciding, for the last hour, that the evening is going to matter.
I plate the ‘stifádo’ in the small white bowls my mother gave us when we got married.
The bowls have a thin gold rim. They are from the set my grandmother brought with her from the village outside Thessaloniki in 1948.
There are seven of them in the cabinet. Two are on the counter.
The other five are stacked behind the everyday plates.
I bring the bowls to the table. Maeve follows.
We sit.
"‘Kalí órexi,’" I say.
"‘Kalí órexi,’" Maeve says back.
She’s been saying it for three weeks now, since her Greek lessons began producing results she would let me see.
The pronunciation is correct. The accent is on the second syllable of ‘órexi.’ I do not comment.
I have been not-commenting on her Greek for two months, since the morning my mother told me at her kitchen table that Maeve had asked her, on the morning after Nora was returned, to be taught.
My mother told me this in those last days before the wedding.
I didn’t tell Maeve I knew.
I have been carrying that secret alongside the ring for forty-six days, the fierce, secret knowledge that my wife has been learning my language in private and intends to surprise me with it when she’s ready, and tonight is the night, and Maeve doesn’t know I know, and the surprise she’s preparing for me is going to be the most beautiful thing my wife has ever given me.
We eat.
Maeve says the ‘stifádo’ is the best version I have made.
I accept the compliment with a single nod.
We talk about almost nothing. The cloud Nora pointed at on the way home from daycare yesterday, which Nora has decided was ‘a cloud that is shy.’ The case prep schedule for the next eight months.
Sarah Klein has sent the timeline. Maeve will be in court approximately twelve days between February and the indictment, and then again at trial in November or December.
Cormac's bandage came off this morning. The scratch is now a small healing line on the inside of his forearm, and he is, by my count, still telling the story to anyone who will listen.
Maeve laughs about Cormac.
She’s been laughing more in the last forty-eight hours than she’s laughed in eight months.
Grand jury closed something in her. I can see it in the particular way she holds her shoulders, in the way her face moves when she laughs, in the way her hand on the wine glass is the hand of a woman who is no longer counting how many sips before the hand starts to shake.
She’s forty-nine hours past the grand jury room.
She’s the woman I am about to ask to be my wife in every register, including the one I have not yet used in English.
? ? ?
I do the dishes.
Maeve sits at the kitchen island and watches me.
I do not let her help. I have not been letting her help with dishes for two months, since the morning I decided that doing small household work for her was one of the ways I was going to spend the rest of my life telling her I love her.
Maeve has been letting me do this. The letting-me-do-this is the shape of how Maeve loves me back.
I finish the last bowl.
I set the towel down.
I look at Maeve across the kitchen island.
She’s looking back.
She’s been looking back for the last four minutes. She’s not spoken. She’s, in the candlelit quiet of the brownstone at 8:43 PM on a Saturday, registered that the dishes are done, and the cooking is done and the wine is mostly gone and the kitchen is the kitchen, and she’s waiting.
I walk to the cabinet.
I take out the pitcher of water and the two glasses we keep on the upper shelf.
I pour two glasses. My mouth is dry. The dryness is the particular physical reaction I have been having since approximately 6:00 PM when I started lighting the candles.
The dryness is not nervousness. The dryness is the body of a man who has been waiting to ask a question for fifty-eight days and whose throat has decided the question is now in the room and is taking up the available moisture.
I bring the water to the island. I hand a glass to Maeve.
We drink.
She sets the glass down.
I set the glass down.
The brownstone is silent. The candles are burning.
The clock in the kitchen reads 8:46 PM. The radiator is running quietly under the window.
Petrov is downstairs in the lobby with Cormac and Declan.
The city is doing what the city does on a Saturday in late January, which is to be cold and quiet and mostly indoors.
"Maeve."
"Lex."
I walk around the island. I stand in front of her. I take her hands in mine. Her hands are warm from the wine glass. Mine are warm from the dishes. The small gold band she’s been wearing since the courthouse catches the candlelight on her left hand.
I take a breath.
"I have been carrying a question for fifty days," I say.
She says, very quietly, "I know."
"I have been thinking about how to ask it."
"I know."
"I thought about doing it the loud way. With my whole family. With music. With all of it."
"Yes."
"I changed my mind."
She doesn’t interrupt.
"I want to ask you the way it started," I say. "Just us. A kitchen. Quiet."
She says, "Lex."
My voice catches. I have to take a breath before I can say the next sentence. Maeve waits. She’s been letting me find words for fifty-eight days; she’s letting me find them now.
"Maeve Callahan."
Pause.
"I love you."
Pause.
The words land in the kitchen. They are the first English version of what I have been saying in Greek for the whole of our life together, and they have weight, and Maeve makes a small sound, and the sound is the exact sound of a woman hearing a sentence she’s been waiting eight months to hear.
"I have loved you since the gala. Since the first morning at your apartment. Since the first time I saw the way Nora sleeps with her hand on her cheek."
Pause.
"I love you."
Pause.
"I love your daughter, who is mine if you let her be. I love what you are. I love what you do to a courtroom. I love what you have made of me."
Pause.
I go to one knee on the kitchen floor.
I have been carrying the velvet pouch in the inside pocket of my coat for days.
I have moved it from one coat to another.
I have taken it out at the Beacon Hill jeweler's on Day fourteen.
I have looked at it in the dark of our bedroom on three separate nights when Maeve was asleep against my ribs, and I was awake in the way I have been awake for fifteen years.
Tonight, I take it out of my coat pocket, and I open it on my open palm.
The ring sits on the small dark velvet square.
The old-European-cut diamond catches the candlelight the way it caught it in 1958 on the day my grandfather slid it onto my grandmother's finger in a stone church outside Thessaloniki.