Page 37 of Night of Shadows
Nico tells me what he’s just been told by a man whose name I will not write down even in my own head. He tells me Nikolai is in Brighton Beach. Nikolai is asking questions. Nikolai has put a contract on Maeve's testimony of one hundred fifty thousand dollars, which is fifty more than the last quote and which means Nikolai is buying speed. Nico tells me a name. Maksim Orlov. The name Petrov flagged forty-eight hours ago and I have not yet escalated.
I tell Nico what I am going to do about Maksim Orlov.
I do it in a voice that is the voice I do not use in Maeve's presence and have not used in a while. The voice that is the voice my brother knows. The voice that decided, ten years ago, that Maksim Orlov's category of person doesn’t get a second contract.
Nico says, "All right."
I hang up.
I turn.
Maeve is at the kitchen window.
She’s been watching me on the porch. She didn’t hear the words because the slider is closed and the words were in Greek. She heard the voice. The voice doesn’t need translation. The voice is the voice of a man who has just told another man what he’s going to do to a third man, and Maeve Callahan has spent time at very close range to Konstantinos and has learned what every voice he uses means.
She’s looking at me through the kitchen window with the small, fine fear she’s not let me see before.
I come inside. The slider closes. The kitchen is warm from the stove. Nora is still asleep down the hall.
Neither of us speaks for a long second. She’s across the kitchen island from me. Her hands are on the marble. Her handsare not shaking. They are very still in the way a thing is still that has decided not to move.
"Maeve?"
"Yes."
"You heard the voice."
"Yes."
I do not deny it. I do not apologize.
I say, "Are you afraid of me right now?"
She says, "A little."
"Good. You should be sometimes. I am what I am."
She holds my eyes. The fear is there. The fear is small. The fear is not pulling her backward. She’s sitting with the fear the way a woman sits with a sound she’s just heard in the woods, deciding whether to walk toward it.
She nods, slowly.
I nod back.
She crosses the kitchen. Stops on my side of the island. Close enough that I can smell her shampoo. Far enough that I am not touching her, because she’s not given me permission to touch her.
"I want to ask you something," she says.
"Ask."
Then she says, "Tell me about Theo."
The name lands the way I knew it would land if she ever said it, which is the way the name has been waiting in my chest for fifteen years to be said by someone who would not look away when I answered.
"Are you sure you want to know?"
She turns from the window. She looks at me. Her face is unreadable in the way her face was unreadable in the foyer of her apartment when I first arrived that day.
"I want to know everything."
