Page 131 of Night of Shadows
I set the phone down on the kitchen floor.
Inside ten seconds, the phone lights up with replies. Nico. My mother. Stavros. Siobhan. Cormac and Declan are in the lobby downstairs. Cathleen, who is at my mother's apartment with Nora. Five replies in eleven seconds.
I leave the phone face down.
I pull my wife against my chest in the candlelight on the kitchen floor of the brownstone we have been building since November and I hold her, and the family is celebrating in their separate kitchens around the city, and the daughter we share is asleep at her grandmother's apartment, and the ring is on her finger, and the Greek is in her mouth, and the rest of our life is starting tonight.
Chapter 36
Maeve
Bringing It Home
1:14 AM. I am looking at my ring.
I have been looking at it for the better part of three hours. I have looked at it in the candlelight on the kitchen floor with Lex's back against the island. I have looked at it in the doorway when Cormac and Declan came up from the lobby with a bottle of champagne and Cormac's first words were ‘Christ, it took you long enough.’ I have looked at it when Nico and Siobhan arrived twenty minutes later with Sofia asleep on Siobhan's shoulder and Eleni walking behind them carrying a tin of ‘kourabiedes’ she had baked at 10:00 PM after Lex's text because, in Eleni's words, ‘you do not celebrate an engagement without something for the people to eat.’ I have looked at it when Cathleen pulled me into a hug at 11:30 PM and said into my hair, in the Boston Irish she’s only used three times in my hearing, ‘Brendan would have lost his mind, Maeve. He would have lost his entire mind.’
And I have looked at it now.
1:14 AM. The family is gone. Eleni took Cathleen back to her apartment, where Cathleen is staying for the week and where Nora is asleep in Eleni's guest bedroom. Nico and Siobhan took Sofia home an hour ago. Cormac and Declan are back atCormac's apartment with the second bottle of champagne, which Cormac took as his finder's fee for being downstairs all night. The brownstone is candlelit and silent. Lex is sprawled on the couch in the dark green sweater I gave him for his birthday, his head against the cushion, his eyes half-closed.
I am looking at my ring.
I cannot stop looking at it.
The diamond catches every candle in the room. The gold band is warm against my skin. The Greek script on the inside, the ‘agápi’Lex's grandfather hid for his grandmother in 1983, is pressed against my finger in a way I will become accustomed to but have not yet. I have been wearing the wedding band for fifty-eight days; that band knows my finger. This ring is new. The newness is the new weight that means tonight changed something I have not yet found language for.
Lex says, from the couch, with his eyes still closed, "You are still looking at it."
I say, "Yes."
"For three hours."
"Yes."
"Are you planning to stop."
"No."
He smiles. I can see the smile from across the room even with his eyes closed. He’s been smiling, in small steady increments, since approximately 11:00 PM when Cormac arrived. The smile is the smile of a man whose face has remembered what it knows how to do.
I walk to the couch. I sit down beside him. He shifts and pulls me against him. His arm goes around my shoulders. I tuck my hand under his where it rests on my collarbone so I can keep looking at the ring while he holds me.
The clock reads 1:17 AM.
The brownstone is the brownstone. The candles are burning low. We have been engaged for four hours and twenty minutes.
? ? ?
I think about Eleni hugging me at the door at 11:15 PM.
She had been crying when she walked into the brownstone. She had been crying in her apartment, by herself, for some unknown number of minutes after Lex's text. She had stopped crying by the time she got into the car with Cathleen. She had started crying again on the elevator ride up. By the time she stood in our doorway in a coat over her Sunday dress with the ‘kourabiedes’ tin in her hands, her face was wet and her eyes were the eyes of a Greek mother who has been waiting fifty-eight days for this exact moment and has, in the last hour, found herself given it.
She didn’t say anything when she hugged me. Eleni Konstantinos, who has had a thing to say at every important moment of my life since November, didn’t speak when she pulled me into her arms in the foyer of the brownstone.
She held me. For a long time. Then she pulled back, held my face in both hands, and said, in Greek, very quietly, ‘Koritsi mou. You are home.’
And I am. I am home. I have been home since the morning Lex made me coffee in this kitchen early on. I have been home since I sat across from him on the kitchen floor at 5:48 AM the night before grand jury. I have been home since the moment in the corridor outside the federal courtroom when he was exactly where he said he would be.
