I do not feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for whoever survives this morning.
"Tell me about him."
"Which."
"Sean."
I do not answer.
I have not said it out loud yet.
Sean is going to walk through the door. He is going to find me on the floor and find Kostas in a wheelchair, and there is going to be a phone and a Greek voice telling him things about himself he does not yet know. He will be asked to choose.
I look at the door. I look at the dawn. I look at the man in the chair.
I am not going to give him the consigliera's answer.
18
NADIA
"He drinks my coffee black," I say.
Kostas blinks.
"That is not what you were expecting me to say."
"It is not."
"It is what I am going to say."
"Go on."
"He drinks my coffee black. He has been ordering it with milk and two sugars his whole adult life because that is the way Frank Donovan ordered it. The first morning he was in my cabin, I poured him a cup of mine. He drank it. He did not say a word. He did not tell me he takes it differently. He has not taken it differently since."
I breathe.
"He has chosen, without telling me, to drink my coffee for the rest of his life."
Kostas is watching me. Patient. The way a man watches a woman he has been waiting to hear speak for forty years.
"He walked into a warehouse on a Tuesday night and put two rounds in a man who was about to put a round in me. He has not told me he saved my life. He thinks I saved his."
"He has a laugh I have heard once. I am going to make him laugh again. I am going to make him laugh in a kitchen with more than just a Chemex. I am going to make him laugh on a Sunday with people I have not yet introduced him to, but who he is going to know the way you know a thing you were always going to know."
"I have not been any of those things since the morning at the cabin."
"He is going to walk through the door of this study, Mr. Stavros. You are going to ask him to choose. He is going to choose me because I already chose him the morning he left me sleeping in my own bed and walked out of my apartment without asking about the family tree."
I look at Kostas.
"I love him."
The room holds.
"I love him the way my mother loved my father, who was not my father, but who raised me anyway. I love him the way Eleni loved me, which is to say enough to die holding my name. I love him the way I had decided, inGinevra, I was not going to love anyone again."
"I was wrong."
