When I get there, the kitchen is full of light. Maeve is at the stove. She’s in my T-shirt and a pair of jeans she pulled on without socks. Her hair is in a knot at the back of her head. Nora is on a kitchen chair pulled up to the counter, in clean dinosaur pajamas—different ones. Brontos is on the counter beside her. Maeve is making pancakes. Real ones. Not slightly burnt.
Nora is narrating something to Brontos.
I stop in the doorway of the kitchen. I watch them for a long minute.
Maeve looks up.
She sees me.
She studies my face for one full second.
She says, very quietly, "Did you do it?"
I look at her.
I say, "I did it differently than I would have done it before her."
Maeve nods, slowly. She’s heard the sentence I just said, and she’s, in the careful corner of her brain where she files things, understood it completely.
She says, "Come eat."
Chapter 26
Maeve
What It Costs
Lex tells me everything.
After breakfast. After Nora has eaten three pancakes and fed Brontos a strategic quarter of one and announced that she’s going to color now and not before, Lex follows me into the small office off the kitchen and closes the door, and he tells me about the warehouse and Andreev and Anya at Dana-Farber and Mikhail Sokolov in Brookline and Dick Foley in South Boston, and he tells me about the pit at the back of the warehouse and the five other men, and he tells me that he had decided, on the drive there at 5:54 AM, that he was going to make Andreev the sixth.
He doesn’t soften the telling.
I have asked him not to soften the telling, and he’s decided to give me what I asked for.
He tells me about the moment in the holding cell when he thought of Nora's bath, and about Anya not getting a thousand more baths, and about the architecture of what Andreev did. He tells me about sitting back down. He tells me about the funding for Anya's treatment from the Konstantinos foundation, untraceable, permanent. He tells me about Petrov saying, ‘Your father would be proud.’ He tells me about driving home.
He tells it all in his voice. The flat operational voice.
I listen.
When he finishes, I am quiet for a long second. I am sitting on the edge of the desk in the small office. He’s standing in front of me. The morning light is coming through the small window over my left shoulder.
Then I say, "You were going to kill him."
"Yes."
"You didn't?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I have a daughter now. The man I was three weeks ago would have killed him. The man I am now is not sure that is the right thing."
I stand up.
I walk around the desk. He’s standing in the middle of the small office in his coat, the coat with the wrong sleeve from yesterday that he’s not bothered to change because he came home and went to me. I stop in front of him. The space between us is six inches.
