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 onthe day my grandfather slid it onto my grandmother's finger in a stone church outside Thessaloniki.
Maeve has gone very still.
She’s looking at the ring.
Her eyes are wet.
"This was Kalliope's," I say. "My grandmother. She wore it for forty-seven years. My grandfather had a Greek word inscribed inside the band on their twenty-fifth anniversary in 1983. He had it inscribed in secret. ‘Yia-Yia’ didn’t know about the inscription until after he died. I will tell you the word when you put it on."
