Page 49 of Night of Shadows
My eyes flood again. This time, I do not bother stopping them. He cannot see my face. I let it happen against the steam still rising from the empty sink.
"I was always going to be here, Lex."
"I know."
"You are the one who came out first."
"I was hungry."
I laugh. Small. Involuntary. The first laugh that has come out of me since the gun teaching scene at the dining-room table: since I started being a different woman than the one who walked into that building two and a half weeks ago.
He laughs against my neck. The laugh is warm. The laugh is raw, real, and wonderful. The laugh is the laugh of a man who has just discovered that he can laugh in his own kitchen, at the side of a woman’s neck, on a Saturday morning, and the discovery, I can feel it through his sternum, is undoing him.
"Lex?"
"Yes."
"You are getting better at this."
"At what?"
"Saying things."
He doesn’t answer that in language. He turns me, slowly, around in his arms. Wet hands at my hips. He looks down at me. I look up at him. The gold eyes are doing what they do, the small architecture around them softening, almost glowing.
He kisses me.
Soft. Brief. The morning version. He pulls back. I pull back. We do not press for more. There is a child in the next room negotiating purple giraffes.
? ? ?
His phone buzzes on the counter.
He hears it before he turns. His face changes in the half-second before he picks the phone up. It is the change I saw at the dining-room table when the package came for him, which isthe face of a man whose work has just walked into the room he’s been pretending was a sanctuary.
He picks the phone up. He reads.
I watch his face.
"Nico," he says.
"What?"
"They have a lead on the mole. He wants me back in Boston tonight."
My chest tightens. I knew this was coming. I knew it was coming the moment I walked out of the bedroom this morning. I have known it since the drive up here. The lake house is borrowed. The lake house was always borrowed. The lake house is a forty-eight-hour parenthesis in a life that is not, at present, parenthesis-shaped.
I make my voice the voice it needs to be.
"How long do we have here?"
Lex looks at the clock above the stove. Then at me. The gold eyes are, for one second, the eyes of a man who is calculating the number of minutes between this moment and the moment he’s to put our daughter and me back into a moving vehicle and drive us back to a house with reinforced windows.
"Eight hours."
Chapter 17
Lex
