Lex listens the way Lex listens to everything: completely, without interruption, each piece filed into an architecture only he can see. His hands are still. The weapon pieces on the table between us.
When I finish, the basement is quiet.
"Who is she?"
"Her name is Katya. Dmitri wouldn't say more. He said that was your question to ask."
"Under his protection." Lex considers this. "That means she's valuable. Or dangerous." A beat. "Or both."
"I'm sorry, Lex."
"Don't." His voice is level. No anger. No accusation. The particular calm of a man who has spent his entire adult life standing beside the cost of this world and always understood that someday the cost would land on him. "You made the right call. Siobhan was in a chair with a gun to her head. You did what you had to do."
"That doesn't make it?—"
"Fair?" He picks up the Sig barrel. Resumes cleaning. Hands steady. "Fair isn't a word that applies to us. You know that."
I watch his hands. Steady and precise. The hands that have killed more people than either of us discusses, now reassembling a weapon with the same care he brings to everything, processing a life sentence with the composure of a man checking tide tables.
"I'll find out everything I can about her before?—"
"I'll handle it." He doesn't look up. "When?"
"He didn't say. Soon, probably."
Lex nods once. The nod that ends conversations. The nod that means: this lives inside me now, in the architecture behind my silence where no one else is invited.
I turn to leave. At the door:
"Nico."
I stop.
"You'd do it again. The deal. For Siobhan."
It's not a question. He's naming the truth I've been circling since the restaurant. The truth I admitted to myself on the drive home and couldn't say aloud.
"Yes."
"Good." Lex's voice is quiet. Almost gentle. "That's how I know the marriage changed you. Three months ago, you wouldn't have admitted that."
I leave. In the hallway, my phone buzzes. Siobhan: "Dinner's getting cold. Come home."
Home. The word that used to mean a penthouse and now means her.
I take the stairs. Behind me, in the basement, Lex sits alone with a disassembled weapon and a name he's never heard and a future he didn't choose. He reassembles the Sig. Each piece finding its place. The spring. The barrel. The frame. Everything in its order.
He's good at order. He's built his life on it, and my guess is the woman named Katya is about to dismantle every piece of it.
Chapter 39
Siobhan
Homecoming
* * *
The Heaney is back on the nightstand. The contractors shipped it with the rest of my things from New Hampshire, and I placed it beside the lamp with the particular satisfaction of returning something stolen to its rightful place. "Scaffolding." The poem is about trust and the structures that hold you up while you build something real.