Page 19 of Night of Shadows
"He doesn't like it."
"That was a brave thing to find out," I say.
She looks at me. Then she does what every Konstantinos child has done since 1923 in Náxos, and which my mother still does at sixty-seven. She nods once, with her mouth slightly turned down at the corners, the small ceremonial nod of a person who has acknowledged a serious comment seriously.
Then she takes Brontos and goes to find a spot on the kitchen floor in a patch of sun.
Maeve and I stand on opposite sides of the island. Neither of us speaks. The kettle is making the small ticking sound a kettle makes when it is cooling. Nora is on the floor, explaining to Brontos, in a voice meant only for him, that milk is not for everyone.
"Lex," Maeve says, very quietly.
“Yah?”
"Sit down before you fall down."
I sit down on the stool across from where my daughter was sitting six minutes ago.
? ? ?
My phone buzzes at 6:37 PM.
Nico.I take the call in the small office Petrov cleared for me yesterday. I close the door. I keep my voice low.
"You said you would brief me fully today."
"Tonight. After she’s in bed."
"Afterwhois in bed?"
There is a beat. The beat is the second time in twelve hours I have given Nico information without meaning to, which is a track record I do not have with him in any other context.
"The witness, Nico."
"Lex. Do I need to come over there?"
"No."
"Are you compromised?"
"Operationally, no. Emotionally, yes."
It is the most honest sentence I have said to my brother tonight. I hear him absorb it. I hear him decide not to press. and hold off on a question because he can hear in my voice that the answer is something I am not going to be able to give him over the phone.
"Tonight," he says. "I will come to the brownstone. We will talk in the office. You will tell me everything."
"All right."
"Lex."
“What?”
"Whatever it is. We have time."
He hangs up first. I stand in the small office, and I think about my daughter on the kitchen floor, explaining milk to a stuffed elephant.
I sit down in the desk chair because Maeve was right, because if I do not sit down, I am going to fall down.
Chapter 8
