Page 13 of Night of Shadows
She says it flat. She says it the way a woman tells a doctor where the pain is. Specific. Not asking for anything. I knew that, but I let her say it because she had to.
I have spent fifteen years reading what people do with their faces when they are holding more than they can lift, and I see what the flatness is. The steadiness is not calm. The steadiness is a hand clamped over a wound. Underneath it, she is shaking — not her hands, she will not allow her hands, but somewhere behind the sternum, in the place a person shakes when they have held things in so long.
The not-asking-for-anything is what undoes me. Because a woman who has trained herself not to ask for anything learned it the hard way, alone, in the months I was a city and three years away, and the cost of that training is sitting in her face right now, costing her again.
I do not move.
I do not move because if I move at all, I am going to do something I have not earned the right to do: take her hand. I haven’t earned that. I have, in fact, been a man whose role in her life has been an absence for three years. I have, in this kitchen, no rights at all to anything except the protection of the woman and the child in front of me.
"I had assumed," I say.
"You had assumed."
"I did the math in Nico's office. The protection order listed her age. I suspected. I did not let myself finish the math."
She looks at me. Her face does the thing it has been doing since she opened the door. Reading. Calculating. But there is something else under the calculation now, and I make myself watch it instead of away from it, because she has earned a witness: relief and grief arriving in the same breath, fighting for the same square inch of her face. Relief that she does not have to perform the shock for me. Grief, I think, that I already knew — that she carried the secret alone for three years, and it turns out the secret was never as hidden as the carrying made it feel.
"You are not surprised."
"I am surprised. I had assumed. I had not confirmed. The two things are different."
"All right."
"May I see her?”
She doesn't move. The photograph is between us on the island. I am asking, very specifically, for permission. She knows what I am asking. She knows what she's granting if she says yes. She knows what she's keeping if she says no. I watch her weigh it, and I watch the weighing take something out of her, because every instinct she has built over three years is telling her to say no, and she is about to override every one of them, and she knows what it will cost if she is wrong about me.
"You can see her in the morning," she says. "You can see her when she comes out of her room and asks me who you are. I will tell her you are a friend who is staying with us. You will introduce yourself with your first name. You will not pick her up. You will not touch her. You will sit at this island while she eats her cereal, and you will let her decide what she thinks of you. Are we agreed?"
"Agreed."
"Lex? For tonight. While she's asleep. I want you to look at her."
My chest tightens.
"You do not have to," I say.
"I know I do not have to. I want to." And here, for the first time, the flatness slips. Not much. A single fault line, the kind you only see if you have been looking at her as hard as I have been looking at her. Her voice drops half a register and goes rough at the edge of it. "She's asleep, and she'll not know. You will look at her. You will leave the bedroom. You will not touch her. You will not say anything to her. You will look at her, because for thirty-seven months you have not known your daughter exists, and tonight you do."
It costs her to give this to me. I can see exactly what it costs. She is handing me the one thing she has never had to share, with her chin up and her arms ready to cross, and the giving is the bravest thing I have watched a person do in fifteen years of watching brave and terrible people.
She picks up the photograph. She walks to the back of the apartment. I have been following her since 11:45 PM at the Greek consulate three years ago, and I do not appear to have stopped.
She opens a door. The door makes a small, specific sound. The kind of sound a mother knows is the sound the door makes.
Inside: a small room. A nightlight shaped like a moon. A crib. A small body curled around a stuffed elephant. Dark hair. Long lashes. A face.
I see her face.
She has my mother's chin. The slight Greek prominence, the very slight square at the bottom. A trait that has skipped Nico, who has my father's chin, and skipped Stavros, who has nobody's chin and refuses to discuss it. The chin is a Konstantinos chin from my mother's mother, who was fromNáxos. My daughter has a chin from a small village on a small Greek island; her great-great-grandmother left in 1923.
I don’t move. I can’t.
Maeve is in the doorway beside me, present, the way her own terms require, before I cross into this room. She's watching me look at the daughter I have not been allowed to know exists, watching to see if I am going to be a man she can trust with this. And I understand, standing here, that this is the actual test. Not the terms. Not the negotiation. This. Whether the man looking at the sleeping child does what she is braced for me to do — reach, claim, take — or whether he holds still and lets the child stay hers. She is holding her breath. I hear it. A woman does not breathe like that unless she is waiting to find out whether she has just made the worst mistake of her life.
I close my eyes for one second. I open them.
I memorize her.
