Page 128 of Night of Shadows
Maeve nods. She cannot speak.
"I am asking you to marry me," I say. "I am asking you to be my wife. I am asking you and Nora to be my family, the way Greek tradition makes a family. Fully. Formally. With everyone we love in the room."
Pause.
"Will you marry me, Maeve?"
? ? ?
Maeve cannot speak.
She’s looking at me. Her eyes are full. Her mouth is open, and the words are not coming. I am on one knee on the kitchen floor with the ring in my hand and my wife is looking at me and trying to find the language she needs, and the language is not arriving.
I wait.
I am patient. I have been patient. I have been patient for fifty-eight days, for thirty-seven months, for fifteen years, for the entire shape of a life that has been organizing itself around thisexact moment in this exact kitchen at 8:54 PM on a Saturday in late January.
And then, because I cannot bear to leave her in the silence, because the patience has its limit, because she’s been waiting for me to give her one more thing in our language, I say it. The Greek I have been carrying since the lake house. The phrase I have been holding for nine chapters. The two words I have been not-translating to her on every other occasion they came up between us.
"‘Eísai diki mou.’"
Maeve's voice, when it comes, is wrecked.
"I know," she says.
"I have been saying it since the lake house. Since the first time we made love. Since the night you said you would do it again every time. I have been saying it in Greek because I could not bear to say it in English yet."
"I know."
"I am saying it in English now. ‘You are mine.’ You have been mine since you walked into the gala in green in 2022. I have been yours since the same minute. I am asking you to let the rest of the world know what you and I have known for three years."
Maeve is crying. She’s not making sound. Her hands are still in mine. Her eyes have not left my face. The candlelight is in her hair and the small gold chain at the base of her throat is moving with her breathing and the brownstone is silent and the world has reduced to my hand and her hand and the ring on the velvet square in my open palm.
She says, "Yes."
I say, "Yes."
She says, "Yes, Lex Konstantinos. Yes. I will marry you. Yes. Yes."
I put the ring on her finger.
It fits. My mother guessed her size by holding her hand for ten seconds at Sunday dinner three weeks ago. The ring slides onto Maeve's left fourth finger over the small gold band she’s been wearing since the courthouse. The two rings together. The wedding band underneath, the engagement ring above. The shape of a marriage that has been a marriage for fifty-eight days and is, this evening, becoming the marriage we are choosing for the rest of our lives.
Maeve looks down at the ring.
She holds her hand up to the candlelight. The diamond catches the steady flame of the candle on the kitchen island. She turns her hand. She’s the second woman in our family to wear this ring, and she’s the first woman in sixty-seven years to know it has Greek words inside it before it goes on her finger, and the inscription is a promise her husband has been keeping for her since 1983.
She slides the ring back off.
She holds it up to the light. She looks at the inside of the band.
She reads the Greek script aloud. Her pronunciation is correct.
"‘Agápi.’"
She looks at me.
I say, "Love."
