I open the door.
He has the package. A flat manila envelope. He holds it like it needs to be cleared for explosives.
"It is light," he says. "There is no powder. There are no electronics. I have already checked." He brings it to the kitchen island. He sets it down. He doesn't open it. He looks at me.
"You can leave the room," he says.
"I am not going to leave the room."
He nods. He opens the envelope very carefully, with one hand, like he wants to preserve evidence for a forensic chain.
Inside the envelope: one photograph. One typed note.
The photograph is of Nora at daycare. Eight by ten. Time-stamped yesterday. The angle is from across the street, second-floor surveillance, professional. Nora's in her red jacket. Brontos is under her arm. She's laughing at something Ms. Fitzgerald has said.
The note is one line.
Mrs. Callahan. Please tell your bodyguard you have until Friday. — Nikolai R.
No scream comes out. No tears. Just a cold, level dropping in my chest, the kind fear does when it has nowhere to go. Somebody stood across the street from the place I trust most in the world and watched my daughter laugh, and put it through the long lens, and printed it, and chose the photo where she was happy. A second time.
That is the cruelty of it. They had a hundred frames, and they picked the one where she is laughing, so that I would have to look at her joy and her danger in the same eight-by-ten-inch for the rest of my life. I look at the photograph of my daughter. Then I look at Lex.
"He sent a photograph of my daughter to my apartment, again.”
"Maeve."
"Lex."
"Yes."
"I need to tell you something."
Chapter 5
Lex
What Maeve Tells Him
She's going to tell me Nora is mine.
I know this. I have known it since the snow boots in the kitchen. Since the math in Nico's office. I have known it since the photograph in the federal folder, and I have known it the way I knew her name across a room three years ago, which is to say I knew it before I knew it.
That is the next ninety seconds of my life. I have to receive the news of what she's been carrying alone for thirty-seven months in a way that lets her give it to me without diminishing it. I have to be still, not flinch, and not be the man who already did the math.
She's at the kitchen island. I am across from her. The photograph of Nora is between us, face-up, on the granite. Brontos in the photograph. The red jacket. The laughing.
"Sit down," she says.
I sit on the small stool at her kitchen island.
"Lex."
"Yes."
She breathes once. The breath is a long one, and I watch what it costs her — the small set of her shoulders before she takes it, the way her hand goes flat on the granite like the counter isthe only thing in the room holding her up. It is the breath of a woman who has rehearsed a sentence for three years and is about to say it out loud, and who is, I understand, more afraid of saying it than she has been of anything Nikolai Reznikov has put on her doorstep. A photograph she could survive. This is the thing she has protected with her whole life. This is the thing she is now choosing to hand to me.
"Nora is yours."
