"Agreed."
"You agreed too fast."
"I agreed at the speed of a man who knows the woman he’s agreeing with."
She doesn’t smile at my smirk.
"Tell me what to do," I say. "Tonight. The next ninety minutes. What do you need?"
"Tea," she says. "You are going to make me a fresh cup of tea because the one I made an hour ago is in the sink, and the one that just came out of my pot is in front of you on the table. The kettle is on the counter. The Earl Grey is in the blue tin. Four minutes."
"Four minutes."
I get up. I walk to her kitchen. I make her a cup of tea.
It takes four minutes.
Chapter 4
Maeve
The Negotiation
He sets the tea down in front of me on the low table at four minutes exactly.
It is not too strong. It is not too weak.
He's used the right amount of milk and no sugar, which I told him three years ago in a hotel room while he was making coffee from a small machine that only made one cup at a time. He remembered it. A man I spent one night with, three years and one lifetime ago, remembered how I take my tea, and the remembering lands somewhere under my ribs and sits there, warm and unwelcome, because I do not have room tonight for warm and I cannot afford unwelcome. I am not going to think about it right now. I have built an entire personality over the last three years around not thinking about it right now.
"Sit down," I say.
He sits.
I take a long pull of the tea. It scalds the roof of my mouth a little, which is good, because the small physical pain is the only thing keeping me located in my own body. I keep wanting to leave it. I keep feeling the urge to float up to the ceiling and watch this from a safe distance, the way you do when something in front of you is too big to stand inside of, and the thing in frontof you is this: the man on the couch across from me is the father of my child.
The man on the couch across from me is going to be sleeping in this apartment for the foreseeable future. The man on the couch across from me is, by every reasonable accounting, the most dangerous person who has ever been in this living room, and the most dangerous part is not the gun I am certain he is carrying. It is that some animal part of me, the part that has not slept in weeks, the part that is so tired of being the only wall between my daughter and the dark, looked at him in my doorway tonight and felt, for one disgraceful second, relief. I am going to negotiate the terms of his presence here as if that second never happened.
"Terms," I say.
He folds his hands. "Go ahead."
"When you're on, you sleep on this couch. When you're not, Petrov's people hold this apartment, and nobody rotates without me knowing. You do not enter Nora's bedroom unless I'm with you or there's an active threat. You do not introduce yourself to her as anything other than a friend who is staying with us for a little while."
"Agreed."
"You work around her schedule, not over it. She goes to daycare four mornings a week. She naps from 1:00 to 2:30. She eats dinner at 6:00, bathes at 6:45, and goes to bed at 7:30. Bedtime is a hard line. You will not, under any circumstances, do anything that disrupts bedtime."
He doesn't say it this time. He takes out a small notebook and writes it down — the nap, the bath, the bedtime — the way a man records something he intends to be held to. I do not know what to do with the fact that he is treating the architecture of my daughter's ordinary little day like an operation worth his handwriting.
"You brief me on threats as they come in. Not around her. Not over her head. Not in her hearing. Me, in this room, when she's asleep or out."
"Understood."
"You will not, at any point, refer to her as your daughter in this apartment. Not when she's here. Not when she's not. We will revisit that. After. Not now."
He goes quiet for the first time since he sat down. Half a second, no more. I feel that half-second the way you feel a held breath in a room. Then: "Agreed." Whatever it cost him to say it, he does not let me see the bill.
"You agree fast."
