? ? ?
That week, I meet Petrov at the warehouse.
The Sokolov briefing is dense. Petrov has been working on it for ten days. There are twenty-three pages of surveillance notes, four photographs, and a chart of Sokolov's known associates that takes up the long table. The chart is the kind of chart Petrov makes, color-coded and immaculate.
I read it. It takes me forty minutes.
When I look up, Petrov is standing across the table watching me.
He’s wearing the same shirt he was wearing the night this started. The shirt is clean. He’s cycled through three of the same shirts. He’s not shaved this morning. The skin under his eyes is the skin of a man who has not slept more than four hours at a time for two weeks.
"Petrov."
"Yes, boss."
"When was the last time you slept?"
"I will sleep when this is closed."
"Petrov."
He looks up.
"Take a week. Go see your sister in Larissa. The investigation will hold for a week."
Petrov is quiet for a long second. He says, "Boss."
"It is not a request. It is an order. From me, not from Nico. I am ordering you to go see your sister."
"Why?"
"Because you have been carrying this family on your back for two decades, and I have only just noticed. Maeve asked me when the last time you slept was, and I didn’t have an answer. I have a family now, and I have started noticing what other men are carrying. Go to Larissa. Drink coffee. Look at the sea. Come back when you have remembered what daylight looks like. The Sokolov thread will hold."
Petrov looks at me for a long time. This afternoon, being seen by his employer for the first time.
Then he says, "Yes, boss."
? ? ?
The party is at Eleni's apartment because Eleni has insisted we have a party for Nora there. With the unbudging certainty of a Greek matriarch hosting her granddaughter’s first birthday in the family’s full presence, the party will be at the place she lives. We have agreed. The apartment is decorated with pink streamers that Stavros hung that morning under Eleni’s direction, and there is a cake on the kitchen counter that Eleni made by hand from her mother’s recipe.
The cake says ‘Happy Birthday Nora’ in green icing with a small green dinosaur Eleni has insisted on. Sofia Konstantinos is in a highchair, eating mashed banana with the gravity of a Senate hearing.
The Konstantinos family is here. Nico, Siobhan, Stavros, Dimitri, and Eleni. The full set.
The O'Brien family is here. Cormac, Declan, Finn (with the missing finger Maeve has not yet seen), and Ronan, who has flown back from Galway for two days specifically for this and is going home tomorrow.
Maeve's mother is here.
Cathleen Callahan, a retired librarian from Tampa, has flown up from Florida for the weekend. She’s sixty-three years old. She’s in a green sweater that brings out her eyes. The same green-gray as Maeve's. She’s sitting at the kitchen table at Eleni'sapartment with a cup of coffee in her hand. She’s been sizing me up since she walked in.
She’s not asked me a direct question.
Librarians ask sideways questions, and that’s how I know I am being interviewed.
Eleni says, “Siobhan, would you like to see the kitchen?” in the language of Greek matriarchs, an instruction that means ‘Cathleen will now be left alone with the man she’s come to inspect.’ Eleni leaves with Siobhan and Sofia.
I sit down across the table from Cathleen Callahan.
