"I told you. I'm agreeing at the speed of a man who knows the woman he's agreeing with."
I look at him. He's sitting on my couch in a dark suit, drinking tea, agreeing to be my daughter's bodyguard and her father in the same breath. His face gives me nothing. There's something under it. I just can't read it yet.
Three years have done something to him.
He's taller than I remember, which is impossible. He has to be the same height. He's gained the kind of presence that fills a room without him doing anything to fill it, the kind of presence I now recognize as the cost of years of being a brother's enforcer in a city where men get killed in parking garages.
There's silver at his temples that wasn't there before. The scar at the corner of his mouth is still there, a small comma. There's a new scar on the back of his right hand that I do not recognize, a thin line running from his thumb to his wrist. His hair is shorter. His eyes are the same gold I have spent years pretending I didn't remember and now have to remember accurately, because the small body in the room down the hall has them too.
That is the part I keep flinching away from. Every time I look at his eyes, I am looking at my daughter's eyes, and every time I look at my daughter's eyes, I have been, for three years, looking at his.
"My turn," he says.
"Your turn."
"I need a logistical brief on Nora. Every routine. Every person who has access to her. Names of teachers. Phone numbers of any caregiver. Names of any father figure she's known."
The last clause hits me in the sternum. He says it without inflection, the way you read the last item off a list, but I have spent three years being the only name on every line of that list, and hearing him ask the question costs me a breath I don’t let him hear me take. He's asking the question he needs the honest answer to. I look at him. He looks at me. We are doing something neither of us has language for yet.
"There is no father figure," I say, and I keep my voice as level as I can because if it shakes, I am going to lose the next ten minutes. "There has never been one. I have not dated anyone seriously in three years. There is a daycare teacher named Ms. Fitzgerald and a backup pickup person named Eileen, who is my cousin, and neither of them has been alone in a room with Nora for longer than the legal pickup window allows. That is the population of adults who have unsupervised access to my daughter."
It is a very small population. I built it that way on purpose, alone, and saying it out loud to him makes the smallness of it suddenly visible, the smallness of the wall I have been, and I do not look at him while the fact of it settles in the room.
"Eileen is in Boston."
"South Boston. Yes."
"Cormac will know her."
"Cormac knew my mother. We are not going to be using Eileen until the grand jury."
He nods. He pulls a small notebook from his interior breast pocket. He doesn't write things down so much as record them. The handwriting is small and very neat. He's left-handed. I didn't remember that detail, and the not-remembering stings in a way I do not have time to examine — that I let him into my body three years ago and never learned which hand he writes with, because I left before morning. That was the only way I knew to keep something for myself.
When he reaches across the table, his shirt cuff rides up. There's black ink on the inside of his left forearm. Greek script. Several lines, running from the inside of his wrist toward his elbow. The lines are tight. The Greek is illegible to me. The question of when he got it is not a question I am going to ask tonight. I file the existence of it the way I file every piece of information I have about him tonight — into the column of a spreadsheet I am keeping in my head titled 'Things About the Father of My Daughter I Didn't Know This Morning.' The spreadsheet is getting long, and the only thing standing between me and the size of what is happening.
"Continue," he says.
"My phone has been compromised twice. Once, two weeks ago, signal interference at the federal building. Once, last Friday, a number I didn't call appeared in my call log at three nineteen in the morning. The federal protective detail says the phone is clean now. They have replaced it twice. I do not believe them." I have stopped believing a great many people lately. It is exhausting, the not-believing. It is its own full-time job, on top of the other full-time jobs, on top of being the only wall.
"Give me the phone."
I take it out of my pocket. I hand it across the table. He turns it off without looking at it. He sets it on the table next to the dinosaur cup.
"You will get a new one in the morning," he says. "Petrov will have a clean device here by eight. Until then, the federal detail can route emergency contact through me. You do not need a phone tonight."
"Lex. You took my phone."
"I took your compromised phone."
"You did it before I said it was okay."
He stops. He looks at me. He's understood what I just said — that taking the phone that fast, however right it was, is the move of a man who handles things without asking the person to whom it belongs. That his protection has a kind of ownership built into it. Something moves behind his eyes, there and gone before I can name it. He sets the phone on the coffee table between us and slides it the last inch toward me with two fingers, deliberate, like a man setting down a weapon he's decided not to need.
"I'm sorry." Even. But his jaw is tight when it's done, and I know the apology cost him something I won't get to see in full.
"You give it back if I ask. You don't act on my behalf without telling me." My hands want to move, so I keep them flat in my lap. I’m afraid that if I let them move, he will see how close I am to the edge of this.
"You tell me before. Always. Not after. Not while I'm asking what you're doing. Before." It is not really about the phone. He knows it is not really about the phone. It is about the fact that for three years every decision about my daughter's safety has been mine and only mine, and the relief I felt in the doorway terrifies me precisely because I cannot afford to hand that over and survive being wrong.
