Page 129 of Night of Shadows
She says, "Love."
She slides the ring back on. She doesn’t need help. The ring sits where it should sit. Her left hand is the left hand of a woman who is, as of 8:57 PM on a Saturday in late January, formally engaged to me.
I stand up. She stands up.
We are crying. Both of us. Finally. And laughing at the same time. I pull her into my arms. She comes into them. I kiss her. The kiss tastes like ten thousand things we have not been ableto say in two and a half years of knowing each other and three months of being married. Her face is wet. My face is wet. The candlelight is moving on the wall above the kitchen island, and the brownstone is silent, and the world is the world I have been building toward since the morning I first saw her in green at a Greek consulate gala in 2022.
I pull back.
I look at her.
I say, "‘Agápi mou.’"
Maeve looks at me. Her eyes are still wet. She’s been waiting for me to say it to her, to her face, with the translation I gave to Nora six weeks ago and have not yet given to her. She’s been keeping the column in her head titled ‘Things Lex Has Not Yet Said to Me But Has Said to Our Daughter,’ and the column has just lost its first item, and the loss is the gift I have been holding for six weeks, and the gift has now been delivered.
She says, slowly, deliberately, the Greek pronunciation careful and correct, "‘S'agapó.’"
Pause.
My whole body goes still.
She’s just said ‘I love you’ to me in Greek.
In Greek.
My language. The language she’s not been speaking to me. The language I have been hearing her use only with my mother, only in passing, only in the deliberate syllables of a woman trying out a phrase. She’s just used it correctly. With the accent on the second syllable. With the soft ‘gh’ sound the way Greeks make it. With the careful grammatical ‘I love you’ that you only say in Greek if you are saying it to someone you love.
I pull back enough to look at her.
I say, "Maeve."
She says, "I have been learning. ‘Mitéra’ has been teaching me. I started the morning after Nora was returned. I told her Iwanted to be able to say things to you in your language. She’s been teaching me twice a week. We have not told you. I wanted it to be a wedding gift. I am giving it to you now instead."
I break.
Properly. I have not properly broken in fifteen years. I have not let the architecture come apart since the morning my father died. The architecture is coming apart now. My legs do not hold. I sit down on the kitchen floor with my back against the island. Maeve sits down next to me. She pulls my head against her shoulder. She holds me. I am crying the way I have not cried in fifteen years, the private wet of a man whose wife has just told him in his dead grandmother's language that she loves him, and who has been carrying his grandmother's language in his chest since 2005, and who has just been given his grandmother's language back by the woman his grandmother told him to marry.
Maeve is crying too. Quietly. Into my hair.
She says, into the top of my head, "You learned Greek for me."
I say, "I was born into Greek."
She says, "I learned Greek for us."
I say, "Maeve."
She says, "Yes."
"I love you in two languages."
"I know."
"I will love you in two languages every day for the rest of my life."
"I am holding you to that."
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