Page 7 of Night of Shadows
Maeve reads my face. Maeve has always read faces. It was the first thing I noticed about her three years ago, watching her work the room before I worked the room, watching her track the exit before she tracked me.
Her shoulders drop a quarter of an inch. It’s not relief. It’s the opposite of relief. It’s the moment a woman registers that something she’s been carrying alone for three years is no longer hers alone.
"Two weeks ago," she says, very quietly, "someone left a photograph on my doorstep. The photograph was of mydaughter at her daycare. It was time-stamped two days before it arrived. There was a note with the photograph. The note said, ‘We know where she goes.’ The note was in Russian and English."
"Maeve."
"Lex."
She probably hasn’t said my name out loud in three years. She says it now the way a person says a word in a language they used to speak. Carefully.
"My brother sent me to protect you."
"Your brother doesn’t know."
"My brother doesn’t know."
"Anyone who knows is going to use her against you."
"I am aware of that."
"I will not let you do that to her."
"I would put a bullet in my own skull before I let anyone use her against me."
It comes out before I can stop it. It comes out flat, and in the voice I use in the basement at Elysium when men have stopped thinking I am the kind of man who is going to ask twice. Maeve stares at me. The chain is still on. Her hand is still on it.
And then she closes the door.
My chest tightens. Then I hear the chain.
She opens the door again. The chain is off. "Come in. Don't wake my daughter. We need to talk."
I follow her inside, and the door closes behind me.
? ? ?
I’ve walked into a thousand rooms in fifteen years, and I have cataloged each of them in the first six seconds. I do it now without thinking. I have to. I have not stopped doing it since I was twenty-two.
Living room, sixteen by twelve, southeast exposure. Three windows, two of them with the kind of after-market security film that costs eighty dollars a window and is meaningless against anyone serious. One door at the back of the apartment, presumably the bedroom hall. A galley kitchen visible through an opening on the right. A couch that has been slept on and not slept on, depending on how the cushions are sitting, which means she’s been alternating, which means she’s been spending some nights on the couch where she can see the front door.
That thought hits me hard.
She’s been spending nights on the couch where she can see the front door.
That’s the catalog. The catalog takes me four seconds. In the fifth second, I see the rest.
A child lives here.
The wood floor between the couch and the kitchen shows slight wear from a small running circuit. There is a basket near the bookshelf with a dozen board books pushed in at angles that suggest a small hand has been allowed to put them away in the manner the hand wants, not in the manner the bookshelf wants.
There is a low table beside the couch that holds a single ceramic mug, a half-folded square of fabric I do not recognize, and a plastic cup with a rubber lid, a straw, and a faded dinosaur sticker. There are two pairs of shoes by the door. One adult. One small pair. Purple.
Maeve walks past me into the kitchen. She sets the teacup down. She does it one careful thing at a time — the way a person moves when the second thing, added too soon, would put themon the floor. She turns back to face me, but doesn’t invite me to sit.
So, I do not sit.
She’s cut her hair. Three years ago, it was long enough to wrap around my hand. It’s shorter now, just past her shoulders, the same dark auburn that has six freckles at her temple I had forgotten about and remember now in the wrong order.
