"Welcome," Nora says.
Cormac looks at me. "Anything you need, Maeve. Through Lex or directly. You call."
"I will."
He goes. Declan goes. Stavros goes. Andreas goes. Dimitri goes last. He doesn’t say goodbye to me. He doesn’t say goodbye to Lex. He puts on a coat that someone has brought for him, walks to the corner in the rain, and the SUV picks him up.
The door closes.
The brownstone is silent. Nora is on the rug with Brontos. I’m standing in the middle of a living room that has just held seven dangerous men and one almost-three-year-old, in the silence of a room altered by their presence and not yet resettled.
I look at Lex. "Your brother knows."
"I know."
"Are you going to tell the others?"
"When I'm ready."
I nod. I do not push. I pick up Nora and Brontos. I take them upstairs to wash their hands before lunch.
Lex stands in the living room alone. I hear his phone buzz on the coffee table. I have no idea what it says. I do not need to.
Dimitri said he would come tonight.
Dimitri is going to come tonight.
Chapter 11
Lex
Dmitri
Maeve is in bed by 10:00. Nora has been asleep since 7:30. The brownstone is quiet.
I sit at the kitchen island on the stool Maeve uses in the mornings. There is a glass of bourbon in front of me. I poured it twenty minutes ago. I have not had any of it. I have stopped drinking before noon, which is a rule I made a year ago that has held, and tonight I am sitting in a kitchen at 10:17 on a Saturday in November holding a glass I have no intention of putting to my mouth.
The kitchen door opens.
Dimitri doesn’t knock. Dimitri doesn’t announce himself. Dimitri has been let in through the back door by Petrov. I told him to let him in. He walked to the kitchen island without a word and sat on the stool across from mine.
He’s wet. His hair is wet again. He’s walked from the corner again.
He is the only one of them who saw it this morning — the only one who did the math over my daughter’s head and arrived at the answer. Dimitri is not a man who can leave an answer unspoken between us. So he has come back, alone, in the rain, at ten o’clock at night, to make me say it out loud.
"How long have you known?" he says.
I tell him.
I tell him the full version, in a flat operational tone. He’s asking me about my daughter. I tell him I knew in Nico's office on Tuesday and confirmed again in the kitchen at Maeve’s apartment ten minutes after I walked in. Finally, Maeve told me in her own kitchen at 12:15 on Wednesday morning. I tell him about the snow boots.
Dimitri listens.
Dimitri doesn’t interrupt. Dimitri does what Dimitri has always done since he was eight years old, and our father caught him stealing a baklava from our mother's tray, which is to absorb information without reacting until he’s decided what to do with it.
"August three years ago," he says.
It is not a question. He’s done the math. He did the math in the front hall of my brownstone six hours ago, while a small girl in dinosaur pajamas was offering him her stuffed elephant, and he’s been holding the math through forty minutes of briefing, a walk in the rain, and a silent Range Rover ride to the corner of my street.
