Her eyes are the gray-green I remembered. She’s lost weight in her face. She’s gained something in her shoulders. She is, by any reasonable measure, more of herself than she was at twenty-eight, and the version of myself that has been keeping her at the level of a memory for thirty-seven months is doing badly with the upgrade.
"Tell me what you know," she says.
"I know there is a contract on you. I know it is from Nikolai Reznikov. I know the price is a hundred thousand dollars, and the instructions specify that the death must be public and slow."
She doesn’t flinch. I had not expected her to.
"What else?"
"I know you witnessed the execution of a federal informant in a parking garage on Tremont Street six months ago. I know the informant was a Reznikov associate who had been turning over Bratva financial records to the federal prosecutor for almost a year. I know they cut his tongue out. And I know they wanted you to see it. I know your testimony in front of the grand jury six weeks from now will materially threaten the Boston Bratva operation, which is why Nikolai has put a price on you that he intends to collect personally."
She nods once. The same nod a woman gives a doctor reading her test results.
"What you do not know," she says, "is on the other side of that door."
She means the bedroom. She means our daughter.
"I worked it out."
"You did the math?"
"In your kitchen. In the second, after I saw the snow boots."
She looks at the boots. She looks at me. There is a long beat where neither of us speaks. Petrov is on the other side of the door, in the hallway, doing the work of a man who has worked for me for twenty-two years. He’s not coming in.
"Lex."
"Yes."
"Sit down."
I sit down on the couch she’s been sleeping on. The cushion gives. The fabric smells like her shampoo, like a child, and like Earl Grey tea. I have not sat on a couch in a woman’s home in eleven years.
Maeve takes the teacup from the kitchen counter. She brings it to me. She sets it on the low table next to the dinosaur cup, then sits down across from me in the small chair angled toward the couch. She tucks her bare feet up under her in a way I would not have expected from a woman who’s being told she’s been hunted.
"Her name is Nora," she says.
It is a Greek name. It means light. She didn’t name our daughter for me. She named our daughter for the part of me she met three years ago in a hotel room and chose not to let into her life. The name is honest. The name is evidence. And a kindness.
"She's almost three," she says. "She’s asleep. She doesn’t know about you. She doesn’t know there is a man hunting me. She doesn’t know what I do for a living except that sometimes the elevator at my office has a button that doesn’t press if Mama is mad at it, which is a story I made up about my key card. She doesn’t know any of this. She knows there’s a friend coming to live here for a little while because Mama needs help with the door."
"That is what you have told her?"
"That is what I have told her."
"Okay, then that is what I will be."
"Lex." The name is a warning and a question, wearing the same coat. She is asking if I understand the size of what I just agreed to.
"That is what I will be, Maeve. A friend who is staying for a little while. To Nora."
She studies me. The same way she studied me at the consulate three years ago. She’s calculating, and I am letting her, because Maeve Callahan is a woman who runs the math herself and arrives at her own conclusions. I have learned again tonight that I am not the man who tells her what to do.
"All right," she says. It is not an agreement. It is a woman deciding to let me prove something before she believes it.
"All right."
“You do not make yourself part of my daughter’s life until I decide what part of it you can be. The rest we’ll get to.”
