Chapter 36
Maeve
Bringing It Home
And I have looked at it now.
I am looking at my ring.
I cannot stop looking at it.
The diamond catches every candle in the room.
The gold band is warm against my skin. The Greek script on the inside, the ‘agápi’ Lex's grandfather hid for his grandmother in 1983, is pressed against my finger in a way I will become accustomed to but have not yet.
I have been wearing the wedding band for fifty-eight days; that band knows my finger.
This ring is new. The newness is the new weight that means tonight changed something I have not yet found language for.
Lex says, from the couch, with his eyes still closed, "You are still looking at it."
I say, "Yes."
"For three hours."
"Yes."
"Are you planning to stop."
"No."
He smiles. I can see the smile from across the room even with his eyes closed. He’s been smiling, in small steady increments, since approximately 11:00 PM when Cormac arrived. The smile is the smile of a man whose face has remembered what it knows how to do.
I walk to the couch. I sit down beside him. He shifts and pulls me against him. His arm goes around my shoulders. I tuck my hand under his where it rests on my collarbone so I can keep looking at the ring while he holds me.
The clock reads 1:17 AM.
The brownstone is the brownstone. The candles are burning low. We have been engaged for four hours and twenty minutes.
? ? ?
I think about Eleni hugging me at the door at 11:15 PM.
She had been crying when she walked into the brownstone.
She had been crying in her apartment, by herself, for some unknown number of minutes after Lex's text.
She had stopped crying by the time she got into the car with Cathleen.
She had started crying again on the elevator ride up.
By the time she stood in our doorway in a coat over her Sunday dress with the ‘kourabiedes’ tin in her hands, her face was wet and her eyes were the eyes of a Greek mother who has been waiting fifty-eight days for this exact moment and has, in the last hour, found herself given it.
She didn’t say anything when she hugged me. Eleni Konstantinos, who has had a thing to say at every important moment of my life since November, didn’t speak when she pulled me into her arms in the foyer of the brownstone.
She held me. For a long time. Then she pulled back, held my face in both hands, and said, in Greek, very quietly, ‘Koritsi mou. You are home.’
And I am. I am home. I have been home since the morning Lex made me coffee in this kitchen early on.
I have been home since I sat across from him on the kitchen floor at 5:48 AM the night before grand jury.
I have been home since the moment in the corridor outside the federal courtroom when he was exactly where he said he would be.
The ring is the document of the homecoming.
? ? ?
I think about Cormac's toast.
Cormac, who had been downstairs for four hours waiting, came up holding a bottle of champagne by the neck.
He didn’t knock. He used the key I had given him three weeks ago when we agreed Konstantinos security would have brownstone keys.
He walked into the living room where Lex and I were on the couch with Nora awake on the rug between us (she had been brought over from Eleni's at 10:30 PM because she would not be left out of this) and he set the champagne on the coffee table and he looked at Lex and he said, "Brother. "
Lex said, "Brother."
Cormac said, "You did the thing."
Lex said, "I did."
Cormac said, "She said yes."
Lex said, "She did."
Cormac said, "In two languages."
Lex said, "In two languages."
Cormac looked at me. He said, "Sister."
I said, "Cormac."
He said, "I am going to make a toast. It is going to be short because Declan is the brother who makes long toasts and I am not Declan. Are you ready."
I said, "I am ready."
He poured. He handed me a glass. He handed Lex a glass. He poured one for himself and one for Declan who was standing in the doorway with his coat still on. He lifted his glass and he looked at the two of us on the couch with Nora between us in her dinosaur pajamas, and he said:
"To Maeve, who walked into a Greek consulate in 2022 in a green dress and ruined my brother's life in the best way. To Lex, who deserved her. To Nora, who got both of you. ‘Sláinte.’"
We drank.
Nora, on the rug, lifted her sippy cup and said, very seriously, "‘Steeneeahmaz.’"
The room broke.
? ? ?
It is 1:23 AM now. I am still on the couch with Lex. The candles are burning down. The brownstone is silent.
I look at the ring.
I think about Cathleen at the door at 11:30 PM telling me, in the Boston Irish she’s only used three times, that Brendan would have lost his entire mind.
I think about Nora on the rug at 10:32 PM, when Eleni had brought her over half-asleep in pajamas, looking at the ring on my hand and then at Lex and saying, with the gravity of a federal prosecutor: "Daddy is going to be my Daddy on PAPER too?"
Lex had said, very carefully, "With your permission, ‘agápi mou.’"
Nora had considered this for a full eight seconds. Then she had said, "Okay. Brontos says yes."
Brontos had been in her lap the entire time. He had not been consulted. Brontos's yes had been imputed.
The room had broken again.
? ? ?
I look at Lex from across the couch. His eyes are still half-closed. His head is back against the cushion. He looks like a man who has spent the day getting engaged and is, four hours later, the most relaxed I have ever seen him.
I say, "Lex."
He says, "Yes."
"Did you sleep at all last night, ‘kírie mou.’"
He goes still.
The stillness is the precise Konstantinos stillness I have been learning to read for two months. His eyes open. He turns his head against the cushion and looks at me. The candlelight is in his face. His expression is not one I have seen on him before.
He says, "Don't."
I say, "Don't what."
"Don't call me that."
"Why not?"
"Don't make me cry twice in one day, Maeve."
I smile. I am smiling because I have, in the four hours since I said ‘s'agapó’ on the kitchen floor, been waiting for a moment to give him one more Greek thing.
‘Kírie mou’ is the moment. The phrase is the old-fashioned wifely endearment Eleni told me about two months ago, when she was teaching me to say ‘welcome home’ and I asked her what an old Greek wife called her husband, and Eleni had said, ‘kírie mou. My lord. It is half-ironic and fully sincere. You will know when to use it.’
I am using it.
I say, "I'll call you whatever I want, Lex Konstantinos."
He laughs. Once. The second laugh I have earned from him today. The first was at 9:23 PM on the kitchen floor when I asked him if he was going to keep me there forever and he said ‘yes’ with the dry inflection that meant he had been planning to.
He says, "Maeve."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"For what."
"For learning a word my grandmother used for my grandfather."
I say, "‘Mitéra’ told me. She said you would hate it. She said you would love it. She said both would be true."
He laughs again. The third. He says, "My mother is correct as usual."
He pulls me closer against him. My head is on his shoulder.
The ring catches the candlelight as I shift, and I see him watch it catch the light, and his face does the particular thing his face has been doing for the last four hours, which is the face of a man whose wife is wearing a ring that has been waiting days to be on her finger.
I say, "Lex."
"Yes."
"When are we going to the lake house?"
"Whenever you want."
"Soon. I want to take Nora before it gets too cold."
"The weekend after next?"
"Yes."
Pause. The candles flicker. I tuck my hand under his again so I can keep looking at the ring.
I say, "And Eleni?"
He says, "Eleni."
"And maybe Cormac?"
He says, "God help us."
I laugh. The fourth, but mine. I say, "I want it to be a family place. Not just a place we go to be alone. The version of you that needed to be alone is gone. Let the version of you that is here meet that house properly."
He pulls me against him. He says, against my hair, "Okay."
Pause. Long pause. The clock reads 1:34 AM.
I say, "Lex?"
"Yes."
"You should bring the rest of your things from Elysium."
"I have very few things."
"Then bring those few things."
He says, "Okay."
I say, "This is your home now. Officially. Not as my bodyguard. Not as Nora's father by accident. As mine. As ours. The version of this where you have an apartment elsewhere is over."
He says, "I know."
"Good."
I sit up slightly. I kiss him. He kisses me back. The kiss is the quiet kiss of an engaged couple at 1:36 AM on the night they got engaged — not urgent and not performative but simply theirs.
When I pull back, his eyes are open. They are tired.
They are warm. They are the eyes of Lex Konstantinos, the most dangerous man in Boston, sitting on a couch in a Brookline brownstone with his fiancée against his side, his daughter at his mother's apartment, his brothers all in his orbit, his mother's mother's ring on the woman he loves, and a wedding to plan.
He’s not been at peace in fifteen years.
He’s at peace now.
? ? ?
His phone buzzes.
I feel him register the buzz against his thigh through the fabric of his pants. He doesn’t move for a long second. Then he pulls the phone out. He looks at the screen.
He says, "Petrov."
"At 1:38 AM."
"At 1:38 AM."
He reads. His face doesn’t change. The Konstantinos face that has been on holiday since 8:54 PM doesn’t return entirely, but it tightens at the corners in the exact way it has tightened a hundred times in the manuscript of our marriage when something operational has crossed his screen.
He says, "Petrov has news."
"About what."
"Sokolov's investigation. He’s found something."
"What kind of something."
"I do not know yet. Something Petrov needs to bring to Dimitri. He thinks Dimitri is the right brother for what is coming next."
I register the shift. Sokolov, the man we arrested. Dimitri, the brother who has been on the edge of every family scene for two months. Petrov, who runs Konstantinos surveillance and doesn’t text people about news at 1:38 AM unless the news is the kind that changes operational direction.
I say, "Dimitri."
Lex says, "Dimitri."
He sets the phone down on the coffee table. He says, "Tomorrow. Not tonight."
I nod.
We sit on the couch. The candles burn down.
The brownstone is the brownstone. The ring is on my finger.
The phone is face down on the coffee table.
Whatever Dimitri is the right brother for is a problem we will face tomorrow.
Tonight is the night the family has been building toward for fifty-eight days.
I close my eyes against Lex's shoulder.
He says, into my hair, "Sleep, ‘kírie's wife.’"