LITMIR.BIZ

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his daughters, because the truth was that if Alan had asked how they were, Zero couldn’t answer.

      He found Maria in the kitchen, wearing an apron over her work clothes as she chopped an onion. “Good visit?”

      “Yeah.”

      Silence. Just the rhythmic tock of the knife against the cutting board.

      “You ready for tonight?” she asked after a long moment.

      He nodded. “Yeah. Definitely.” He wasn’t. “What are you making?”

      “Bigos.” She dumped the cutting board’s contents into a large pot on the stove that already contained simmering kielbasa, cabbage, and other vegetables. “It’s a Polish stew.”

      Zero frowned. “Bigos. Since when do you make bigos?”

      “I learned from my grandmother.” She smirked. “There’s still a lot you don’t know about me, Mr. Steele.”

      “I guess so.” He hesitated, wondering how best to broach the subject on his mind, and then decided direct was best. “Um… hey. So tonight, do you think you could maybe try not to call me Kent?”

      Maria paused with the knife hovering over a dried mushroom. She frowned, but nodded. “Okay. What do you want me to call you? Reid?”

      “I…” He was about to agree, but then realized that he didn’t really want that either. “I don’t know.” Maybe, he thought, she should just avoid calling him anything.

      “Huh.” It was obvious from her expression that she was concerned, wanted to push further into whatever was going on in his head, but it wasn’t the time to unpack all that. “How about I just call you ‘pookie’?”

      “Very funny.” He grinned in spite of himself.

      “Or ‘cupcake’?”

      “I’m going to get changed.” He headed out of the kitchen even as Maria called after him, laughing to herself.

      “Wait, I got it. I’ll call you ‘honeybunch.’”

      “I’m ignoring you,” he called back. He appreciated what she was trying to do, attempting to diffuse the situation with humor. But as he reached the top of the short staircase that led to the loft, the anxiety bubbled up within him again. He’d been glad for Alan’s visit because it meant he didn’t have to think about it. He’d been glad Alan didn’t ask about the girls because it meant he didn’t have to face facts or memories. But there was no avoiding it now.

      Maya was coming to dinner.

      Zero inspected his jeans, made sure they were free of holes or errant coffee stains, and traded his lounging T-shirt for a striped button-down.

      You’re a liar.

      He ran a comb through his hair. It was getting too long. Slowly turning gray, especially at the temples.

      Mom died because of you.

      He turned sideways and inspected himself in the mirror, pulling his shoulders back and trying to shrink the slight paunch that had gathered around his belly button.

      I hate you.

      The last meaningful exchange he’d had with his eldest daughter was vitriolic. In the hotel room at The Plaza when he’d told them the truth about their mother, Maya had stood from the bed. She’d started quietly, but her voice rose quickly by the octave. Her face growing redder as she cursed at him. Called him every name he deserved. Telling him exactly what she thought of him and his life and his lies.

      After that, nothing had been the same. Their relationship had changed instantly, dramatically, but that wasn’t the most painful part. At least she was still there physically, at the time. No, the slow burn was so much worse. After the admission in the hotel, after they had returned home to their Alexandria house, Maya went back to school. She was ending her junior year of high school; she’d missed two months of work but she hit the books with an intensity Zero had never seen in her before.

      Then that summer came, and still she exiled herself to her room, studying. It didn’t take long for him to figure out what was going on. Maya was fiercely intelligent—too smart, he’d often say, for her own good. But in this case, she was too smart for his good.

      Maya studied and worked hard and, thanks to a little-known bylaw in her school district’s charter, she was able to test out of her senior year of high school by taking and passing every AP exam. She graduated from high school before the end of that first summer—though there was no ceremony, no cap and gown, no walking with classmates. No proud, smiling photos next to her father and sister. There was just a form letter and a diploma in the mail one day, and Zero’s abject astonishment as he realized what she was trying to do.

      And then, only then, was she gone.

      He sighed. That was more than a year ago now. He’d last seen her just this past summer, around July or August, not long after his fortieth birthday. She rarely came down from New York these days. On that occasion she’d come back to get some of her belongings out of storage, and had hesitantly agreed to have lunch with him. It had been an awkward, tense, and mostly silent affair. Him asking questions, prodding her to tell him about her life, and her giving him succinct answers and avoiding eye contact.

      And now she was coming to dinner.

      “Hey.” He hadn’t heard Maria come into the loft bedroom, but he felt her arms around his midsection, her head resting against his back as she hugged him from behind. “It’s okay to be nervous.”

      “I’m not nervous.” He was very nervous. “It’ll be good to see her.”

      “Of course it will.” Maria had organized it. She had been the one to reach out to Maya, to invite her over the next time she was in town. The invitation had been extended two months earlier. Maya was in Virginia this weekend to visit some friends from school, and reluctantly agreed to come. Just for dinner. She wouldn’t be staying. She made that very well known.

      “Hey,” Maria said softly behind him. “I know the timing isn’t great, but…”

      Zero winced. He knew what she was going to say and wished she wouldn’t.

      “I’m ovulating.”

      He didn’t respond for a long moment, long enough to realize that the silence was becoming uncomfortable as it yawned between them.

      When they first moved in together, they had agreed that neither of them was terribly interested in marriage. Kids were not even on his radar. But Maria was only two years younger than him; she was rapidly approaching forty. There was no longer a snooze button on her biological alarm clock. At first she would just casually mention it in conversation, but then she ceased her birth control regiment. She started keeping keen track of her cycle.

      Still, they’d never actually sat down and discussed it. It was as if Maria simply assumed that since he’d done it twice before, he would want to be a father again. Though he never said it aloud, he secretly suspected that was why she hadn’t pushed for him to return to the agency, or even to teaching. She liked him where he was because it meant there would be someone to care for a baby.

      How can it be, he wondered bitterly, that my life as an unemployed civilian could be more complicated than as a covert agent?

      He’d waited too long to reply, and when he finally did it sounded forced and lame. “I think,” he said at last, “that we should put a pin in that for now.”

      He felt her arms fall away from around his waist and hastily added, “Just until we get past this visit. Then we’ll talk, and we’ll decide—”

      “To wait longer.” She practically spat the words out, and when he turned to face her she was staring at the carpet in undisguised disappointment.

      “That’s not what I’m saying.”

      Yes, it is.

      “I just think it warrants a serious discussion,” he said.

      So I can man up enough to admit

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