"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.’"
Chapter 37
Lex
The Lake House, Again
Two weeks after the proposal. Friday afternoon.
We drive to the lake house in two SUVs. Maeve, Nora, my mother, and I in the first vehicle. Cormac in the second, alone, because Cormac said he wanted to ‘get my head on straight in the car since I am about to be in a house with you people for forty-eight hours.’ Nico and Siobhan are following at 5:00 PM after Sofia's afternoon nap, and they will arrive around 8:00 PM with the baby asleep in the car seat.
Stavros is absent. Declan is absent. Dimitri is absent.
Stavros and Declan have been working a Belov-connected shipping manifest in New Bedford for nine days. The manifest is the operational lead, Petrov surfaced after Karpov's arrest. Stavros sends regular snarky updates from a motel he describes as ‘a place I am going to write a Yelp review for that ends my career.’ Declan sends none, because Declan doesn’t text. Both will return to Boston in three days.
Dimitri is running point on the Sokolov investigation directly with Petrov. He’s been at it for two weeks since the night of the proposal. He has not come to a family dinner in fourteen days. He’s not returned my calls in eleven. My mother has stopped asking after him, which is what my mother does when she’sdecided that the brother in question is doing the work the family needs and is not to be interrupted.
I worry about Dimitri. Quietly. Privately. The way I have worried about Dimitri since approximately 1997, when he was eight years old and our father took him to the warehouse in Allston for the first time and he came home that night and didn’t speak at the dinner table. Dimitri has been quiet ever since. The quiet has been deepening since the night of the proposal. I do not know what he’s doing on the Sokolov work. I trust him with it. I do not have to know.
? ? ?
The lake house at 4:23 PM has changed.
It has not physically changed. The porch is still gray-painted boards. The screen door still sticks at the hinge. The dock still goes out forty feet over the water and turns left for another twenty. The cabin still smells like cedar and damp wool and the slow specific accumulation of a house that gets used six weekends a year and is otherwise empty.
What has changed is who is in it.
My mother is in the kitchen with Maeve. Eleni Konstantinos has not been to the lake house in many years. She came once with my father long ago, before he was killed, and she’s not come back. She told me on the drive up that she had been waiting to come back and had decided, on the morning of the proposal, that she would wait no longer. She’s currently teaching Maeve to make ‘spanakopita’ the proper way, which involves a phyllo-dough technique I have never seen Eleni execute on anyone before and which Maeve is absorbing with the carefulfocus of a woman who has decided she’s going to learn how the Konstantinos women cook.
Nora is on the dock with Cormac.
She’s throwing rocks. Cormac, six-foot-four Irish boss, has discovered that throwing rocks in lakes is genuinely fun. He’s been throwing rocks for an hour. Nora has been throwing rocks for the same hour. Cormac is teaching her to side-arm the flat ones, so they skip. Nora's skips are at zero. Cormac's are at four. Cormac is celebrating each of Nora's non-skips as if they were six-skip cathedral throws.
I am on the porch watching.
The water is gray under a low gray sky. The trees behind the cabin are bare. The bones of the branches stand against the late-winter light. A thin crust of old snow at the edges of the path. The air smells like wood smoke. Someone two coves over have the wood stove going.
Maeve comes out onto the porch with a coffee and hands me one. She’s in jeans and one of my old fishing sweaters, and the engagement ring on her left hand is the bright weight that has been catching my eye for two weeks straight.
