Page 103 of Night of Shadows
Late.
I do not know how late. The clock on her bedside reads 1:23 AM. The brownstone is quiet. Maeve is half-asleep on my chest. We have been talking for two hours. About the proposal. About the wedding. About when Nora's name change should happen. About whether her mother, Cathleen, will want to fly up for the asking-with-words or wait for the wedding itself.
About whether we should invite Cormac to the asking, given that Cormac is family now, and given that the asking will be at my mother’s apartment, and given that Cormac will want to be there, and that Maeve has decided Cormac is the brother she always wanted and the brother her own brother could not be.
Then she shifts against me. She lifts her head.
She says, "Lex. What are you going to do with the lake house?"
I think about it for a long second.
I think about the lake house. I think about the dock in November. I think about the bandage on my arm and the way she sat in front of me on the bed at the lake house and undressed me. I think about the seventeen years I have owned it. I think about the version of me who bought it. The version who needed somewhere to be alone. The version who used to drive up there at midnight, sit on the dock in the dark for six hours, and thendrive back. The version who spent eleven years there in winter, with no one knowing where I was.
I think about that man. I am no longer that man.
I say, quietly, "I am going to sell it."
Maeve sits up.
She’s on her elbow now. Looking at me. The duvet is at her waist. Her hair is on one shoulder. She’s naked, and her face is wet, and she’s the most beautiful thing in this brownstone by a margin too wide for measurement, and she’s shaking her head.
"No," she says.
"Maeve…"
"No. Don't sell it."
"I bought it because I needed somewhere to be alone. I do not need that anymore."
"I know," she says. "That's not why you should keep it."
She puts her hand on my chest. Her hand is over my heart, the way her hand has been over my heart since the first night she came to the brownstone and laid her hand there to feel the heartbeat she had not been allowed to feel for thirty-seven months.
"Don't sell it," she says. "Take us there. Take Nora there. Take Eleni there. Take Cormac, if you must, though God help us when Cormac sees a kayak. Make it a place we go together. The version of you who needed it alone is gone. The lake house has not met the version of you who is here now. Let it. Let the lake house meet this version. Let it become the place where we go in the summer, and where Nora learns to swim, and where you teach our children whatever it is that fathers teach their children at lake houses. Don't sell what you bought when you were a man who needed solitude as a way of staying alive. Take the man you are now to that lake. Let him see what you have done with what you saved."
I look at her.
I cannot speak, so I just say, "Okay."
She says, "Okay."
She lowers herself back down to my chest.
She’s asleep within four minutes.
? ? ?
The light at the window is gray. The candle is out. I do not remember when I blew it out. Maeve is asleep against my ribs. Her breathing is slow. Her hand is curled at my collarbone. The duvet is over both of us now. The brownstone is the brownstone.
I am awake. I have been awake for two hours.
I will be awake another hour, until Maeve stirs, and I get up, make her coffee, and bring it to her in bed because that is what I do on the mornings she’s slept hard.
I will be awake watching the light change and the city wake up, and the woman on my chest sleep with the architecture of the rest of our lives now permanently, irrevocably, structurally in place.
I reach for my phone.
Slow. So as not to wake her. The phone is on the nightstand next to the empty candle holder.
