"Thank you."
She kisses my cheek. She takes Nora's small mittened hand and turns toward the foyer, where Petrov is holding the door open with the small smile of a man who has not yet returned to the version of himself he was before he went to visit his sister Larissa. She pauses at the threshold and says, in Greek, very quietly, something I do not catch.
Lex, behind me in the hall, answers in the same Greek. One word. ‘Né.’Yes.
Eleni nods, satisfied. She and Nora go.
Petrov leaves. The door closes.
The brownstone, for the first time in fifty-five days, contains exactly two people.
? ? ?
Lex makes dinner.
He’s been making dinner for three weeks now. It started the day after Nora's birthday, when I came home from grand jury prep and found him at the stove with a Greek cookbook open on the counter and an expression I had not seen on his face before. The expression of a man who had decided to learn a thing in his mid-thirties and was not going to be defeated by it.
The first dinner was edible. The second dinner was good. By the third week, he was making ‘stifádo’from a recipe hismother had written out for him on an index card in her cramped Greek handwriting. The ‘stifádo’ was so good that I made the mistake of saying so, and Lex spent the next five days perfecting it because Lex Konstantinos doesn’t accept a compliment as a stopping point.
Tonight, he makes lamb.
Slow-roasted with lemon, garlic, and oregano, the simple Greek recipe his grandmother used to make on Sundays when he was a child, when she could still see well enough to read the recipe she had carried with her from the village in 1948. The kitchen smells like a small Greek apartment in Brookline forty years ago. The kitchen smells like the version of love that is doing instead of saying.
I sit on the kitchen island stool with a glass of red wine.
I am in jeans and one of his sweaters, the dark gray one he wore at the lake house in November, the one I have started wearing on Saturdays because the sleeves are too long and the wool is soft and the smell is the smell that has, in the last fifty-five days, become the smell of safety.
He glances over at me from the stove. He doesn’t say anything.
"What did Eleni say at the door," I ask.
"In Greek."
"Yes."
"She said, ‘Take your time.’"
"Take your time with what?”
Lex looks at me across the kitchen. The gold eyes do what they do when he is, in his interior architecture, deciding how much to say.
"With you," he says.
My pulse moves once in my throat.
I drink my wine. We don’t look at each other. We exist for the next forty minutes in the charged air of a kitchen where twopeople who have been waiting on each other are both pretending to be doing something else.
There is a candle on the dining table when we sit down.
I didn’t see him light it. The candle is small and white and unscented, the kind he buys by the case at the hardware store on Beacon Street because he doesn’t believe in scented candles in a house with a child who has asthma triggers. The flame is steady. The candle is in a small, clear glass holder in the center of the table, and it is not a romantic candle, nor is it a casual candle; it is exactly the candle a man lights when he’s trying to mark an evening as something without making a scene about marking it.
Lex plates the lamb.
He’s been plating things carefully for weeks. The plating is not Instagram-careful, but with intention. The lamb is in the center. The lemon potatoes are at one o'clock. The greens are at five o'clock. The plate is warm. He’s warmed the plate.
He sets it in front of me.
"‘Kalí órexi,’" he says, very quietly. The Greek for ‘good appetite,’ the phrase his grandmother said over every meal she ever served him. The phrase Petrov brought back from Larissa glazed onto a small ceramic plate. Lex says it the way Greeks say it: not as a flourish, as a blessing in plain clothes.
