Page 130 of Night of Shadows
We sit on the kitchen floor for a long time.
My back is against the island. Her head is against my shoulder. The candlelight is moving on the kitchen wall above us. The clock reads 9:12 PM. Then 9:18. Then 9:23. We are not talking. The silence is the silence of two people who have just done what they have been organizing their lives around and are now, on the floor of their own kitchen, in the exact shape of ‘it is done.’
Around 9:31 PM, I say into her hair, "Maeve."
"Yes."
"There is one more thing."
She doesn’t lift her head from my shoulder. She says, "All right."
I take a breath.
"My grandmother made me two promises before she died," I say. "You know the first. The first was to marry a woman who knew me. I made that promise when I was sixteen. I kept it tonight."
Maeve nods against my shoulder.
"The second promise was that I would name a daughter Kalliope, if I ever had one."
Maeve goes still.
I say, "I have a daughter. She’s in the next phase of her name. When she takes my last name, after the wedding, I would like her to also carry my grandmother's name. As her middle name. ‘Yia-Yia’ would have wanted that. ‘Mitéra’ would want that. I would want that. But it is your daughter. And it is your decision. So I am asking. Will you let her be Nora Kalliope Konstantinos."
Maeve lifts her head from my shoulder.
She looks at me. Her eyes are still wet. The face she’s making is the face of a woman who has been blindsided by a question she didn’t see coming and is, in the next two seconds, deciding she’sknown the answer to it for some amount of time longer than the question has existed.
She says, "Yes."
"Maeve."
"Yes, Lex. Yes. ‘Yia-Yia’ gets the middle name. Of course she does. Nora Kalliope Konstantinos. Of course."
I close my eyes for one full second.
I open them.
I lean my forehead against Maeve's forehead. We sit like that, on the kitchen floor, with our daughter's full future name between us, with the candlelight moving on the wall above us, with the brownstone silent and the city quiet and the family at my mother's apartment waiting for the text I have not yet sent.
Maeve says, against my forehead, "Send the text, Lex."
I say, "In a minute."
"They have been waiting."
"In a minute."
She doesn’t press. She knows. She’s the woman who knows me. She’s known me since the gala in 2022, and she’s going to know me for the rest of our lives, and a minute longer for me to keep her on the kitchen floor in the candlelight before I tell my family that the answer is yes is a minute she’s going to give me.
We sit on the kitchen floor for a minute.
At 9:47 PM, I take out my phone.
I text my brother.
One word.
‘Yes.’
