"Andreev specifically."
Petrov is quiet for one full second. Then he says, "Andreev was the one who suggested the rotation timing. He proposed it to the Marshals' lead at 4:30 PM yesterday afternoon."
I close my eyes for half a second. I open them. I look at Petrov. I do not raise my voice. No need.
"Find them."
Petrov says, "I'm working on it. Forty minutes ago."
? ? ?
My phone buzzes.
Text.Unknown number.
I open it. A photograph. My daughter.
Nora is in a car seat I do not recognize. The car seat is in a vehicle I cannot identify from the angle. She’s in her dinosaur pajamas. Her hair is on one side from sleep. She’s holding Brontos, or Brontos is on her lap, and she’s holding the trunk. Her eyes are open. Her face is the face of a child who has been woken up in the middle of the night by people she doesn’t know and is, with the quiet, fierce gravity of a child under three, trying to assess whether she’s in trouble.
She’s alive.
She’s alive. She’s in a car seat. She has Brontos.She’s alive.
The text under the photograph is one line.
‘Mr. Konstantinos. We have your daughter. We will be in touch.’
I look at the photograph for one full second.
Then I cross the room. I sit down on the arm of the couch beside Maeve and Mama. I hold the phone where Maeve can see the screen.
I do not speak. I do not need to.
Maeve looks at the photograph of her daughter.
Maeve doesn’t scream. Maeve doesn’t cry. Maeve looks at me.
She says, very quietly, in the voice she uses for courtrooms, only quieter and steadier than I have ever heard her use it, "Lex, bring her home.”
Chapter 22
Maeve
The Wait
This is the worst day of my life.
That sentence has been true four times in my thirty-one years. The first was the day my father told my mother he was leaving, and I was eleven and I sat on the stairs and counted the cracks in the banister so I would not have to listen. The second was the day I learned I was pregnant in a Brookline drugstore bathroom three years ago and stared at the second blue line on the test for nine minutes because I could not, with my hands, put the test in my coat pocket. The third was the day my uncle Brendan died, fast and unfair, of a heart attack on a barstool at the Black Rose at three in the afternoon.
Today is the fourth.
Today is already worse than the other three combined, and the day is not over yet.
It is 9:14 AM. My daughter has been gone for five hours and twenty-two minutes.
Lex is hunting.
That is the verb. He used a different verb when we left Eleni's apartment building at 6:32 AM. He used the verb ‘work,’ which is the verb operational men use when they are about to doviolence and do not want the woman they love to be inside the violence with them.
