She doesn’t lift her head from my chest. She’s asking the question against my sternum, where she doesn’t have to look at my face.
"I want you to take Nora. I want her with you and your family. Not my mother in Florida. Not my firm friends. You."
"Maeve."
"Promise me."
I have been a man who has made approximately twelve promises in fifteen years. The promises have been to my brothers, to my mother, to my father at his grave, to a woman in Athens at twenty-one I have not seen since, and to my grandmother on the morning she died.
I am about to make a thirteenth.
I think, in the one corner of my brain still functioning at 1:47 AM in a brownstone in Boston, that this promise will outlive every other promise I have ever made because it is the one I will be tested on hardest, and I think also that I am going to keep it, and I think also that the keeping of it will be what makes me the man Maeve has decided to choose.
I say, "I promise."
She closes her eyes against my chest. She breathes once, deep and shaky.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay."
I pull her tighter against me, carefully, because of the bandaged arm. I do it with the good arm. I press my mouth into the top of her head, and I keep it there for a long time.
She falls asleep against my ribs.
I do not sleep.
I have made two promises tonight that I have not yet given names to. The first is the word in my chest I didn’t say out loud. The second is the promise about Nora. The two promises are not the same promise.
They are two halves of the same architecture. The first is the ‘what.’ The second is the ‘if anything happens to me.’Together, they describe a man who has, in the space of one night, decided to belong to a woman and a child without either of them knowing.
I do not have the English word for what is happening to me.
The Greek word would not be enough either.
I will name it later. I have time.
I have, in this moment, the woman I love asleep on my chest, the daughter I love sleeping at her grandmother's apartment two miles away, and a Sig on the nightstand within arm's reach, and outside the window the city of Boston is doing what it does at four in the morning in November. Cold and quiet and full of people who do not know we exist.
This is enough. This is enough until the phone rings.
I pick up before the second ring.
"Petrov."
Petrov's voice on the line is the voice I have not heard from Petrov in twenty-two years. The voice is wrong. The voice is the voice of a man who has been in his job long enough to know what he’s calling about and is making the call anyway.
He says one sentence.
"Lex. Eleni's apartment. Now."
Chapter 21
Lex
Eleni’s Door
Seventeen minutes.
