Page 79 of Night of Shadows
Mid-sentence. Not as a question. Not as a recognition. Like breathing. Like she’s known the word her whole life, and the saying of it doesn’t require ceremony.
The word is small. The word is casual. The word ends me.
My knees go weak. I steady myself against the door frame. I am still holding her. I cannot drop her. I can feel my own breathing go, and I make it come back because Nora is in my arms, and the woman who is holding her is going to keep her steady.
Lex's face.
I am watching him from a distance of three feet across the threshold of our daughter's bedroom.
He doesn’t drop to his knees.
He wants to. I can see he wants to. He doesn’t, because Nora is half-asleep against my shoulder, and a man dropping to his knees in front of a child who has just been kidnapped is something that will scare her. Lex has decided in the last twelve hours that he’s not going to be a thing that scares her.
He walks across the room. He stops two feet from me. He holds out his hands. I hand her to him.
Nora goes into her father's arms with the small, soft surrender of a child who has decided that the negotiation between bath and bed is over, and she’s being delivered to the place where she’s going to sleep.
Lex holds her.
Then he says, low, into her hair, in a voice that is the voice of a man making a vow he’s had loaded in his chest for twelve hours and is finally allowed to deliver, "I'm here, ‘agápi mou.’"
‘Agápi mou.’
My love.
It is the first translated Greek endearment Lex Konstantinos has used out loud in this room, and it is not for me. It is for our daughter. He’s called me‘eísai diki mou’twice in this lifetime,both times into my hair, both times untranslated. He’s not yet given me a Greek word for love.
Nora gets ‘agápi mou.’
I file that in the column of my brain titled ‘Things Lex Has Not Yet Said to Me But Has Said to Our Daughter,’ and I file it without grief, because a man who can call his daughter ‘my love’ the night she comes home is a man who is going to call his wife ‘my love’ eventually, and I am a woman who can wait.
Lex carries her to the crib. He puts her down gently. Brontos goes beside her. Lex stands looking at her for a long minute.
Nora is asleep within a few minutes.
? ? ?
Lex turns off the lamp. We walk out of the bedroom together. He pulls the door almost shut, leaving a gap of two inches. I leave because Nora can sleep with the hallway light coming through the gap, but cannot sleep without it.
In the living room, I sit on the couch.
My hands are clenched in my lap.
I have been holding myself together for fourteen hours and forty-seven minutes, and I can’t do it any longer. I do not want Lex to see the stopping. I do not want anyone to see it. I want to go to the bathroom and stop holding myself together in private and come out clean.
Lex sits next to me.
He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t speak. He sits at a careful distance, the same distance he’s been keeping all night, thedistance of a man who has decided he’s not going to take anything that has not been offered.
I look at my hands and say, "She's okay."
"She's okay."
"I heard her say it."
"Yeah."
"Lex."
