She lets the silence return, but now it's easier, more like sharing a blanket than a cell.
I tap the window with my finger, counting the lights that dot the outer wall.
"How long have you worked here?" I ask.
"Three years."
She doesn't look at me.
"Long enough."
I nod, weighing the response.
"And before?"
A pause.
"I was in Kildare. Nanny job. Didn't suit me."
I wonder, briefly, who hires a bodyguard as a nanny, but I do not ask.
Instead, I watch her reflection in the glass, the way her eyes move when she thinks she's being subtle.
"You're loyal to the house," I say, "but not to him."
She shrugs.
"I'm loyal to what I'm protecting."
Her voice is careful, measured, as if she's reading the script for the first time.
We let that hang, the only sound the tick of the hallway clock through the closed door.
I stub out my cigarette, rolling the butt between my fingers.
"Thank you," I say, and it's more loaded than I mean it to be.
She holds my stare for a second, then nods.
"He's not all bad," she says, soft enough that I have to lean forward to hear it, "but be cleaner next time."
I watch her walk out, the click of the door almost a kindness.
When the room is empty again, I stare at the moon,replaying every word, every glance, every flicker of meaning until I fall asleep.
The days spill over one another, and I fill them with work.
My father's records are meticulous, but they stop abruptly the week before his death.
The last entries are in a different hand, blocky and rushed, as if someone else had taken over the accounting and wanted to finish quickly.
I study these pages until the numbers blur, but the pattern never changes—Wexford, followed by an Italian name, followed by a dash and a string of figures that make no sense.
I write the Italian name on a slip of paper, over and over, until it loses meaning.
At night I dream of the port, the hulking cranes moving in slow, balletic arcs, the glow of container ships on the water.
I dream of my father, alive and whole, sitting at the kitchen table with a pen between his teeth, the taste of ink staining every word he speaks.
