“Stay on the barre,” he said.
I stayed. My hands on the wood. The grip was the same grip I had used for fifteen years – knuckles firm, wrists turned, the dancer’s hold. He peeled the clothes off me from behind, slowly – the tank top over my head, his lips against the back of my neck as the fabric passed. The leggings next – his thumbs hooking the waistband, drawing them down, his mouth following the line of my spine. The cello played. The mirror showed everything.
He turned me around. The barre was cold against my lower back. He looked at me – the sweat drying on my collarbones, the flush from the dancing, the body that had been working through fear – and he knelt.
Lachlan on his knees. The man who commanded rooms. The man whose voice directed the movements of an entire operation. On his knees on the cold studio floor with his hands on my thighs and his mouth on me and the precision – the same meticulous attention he applied to everything. My hands gripped the barre. The wood creaked. In the mirror behind him I could see my own face and it was not the composed face, it was the other one, the one that existed only in rooms with locked doors and a man whose mouth was making systematic, unhurried work of undoing me.
He stood. He lifted me onto the barre – the narrow rail, my thighs on the polished wood, his hands holding me steady. The position was precarious and that was the point. I needed him for balance. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him between my legs and his forehead touched mine and for a moment we were still – two people in the cold studio with the cello playing and the mirror reflecting them and the fear in my muscles transmuting into the other kind of urgency.
He pressed into me and I held the barre with one hand and held him with the other and the cello drew its slow notes across the room and the rhythm was his rhythm – measured, deep, controlled until it wasn’t. The moment his control failed was the moment I loved him most: the jaw unclenching, the grip on my hips going past precise into desperate, the single sound – my name, just my name, said the way a man says a word when the word is the only one left.
In the mirror I could see both of us and what I saw was the truth: we were real. Whatever else was uncertain, this was not.
Afterwards. The floor. The cold returning to our skin. He lay beside me with one arm across his eyes and the other on my hip and I looked at the ceiling – white, cracked, unremarkable – and that was the point. The ordinary surface of a room where extraordinary things had just happened, holding them like a frame.
The last ordinary evening.
The kitchen. All of them. The table was set for six – Morven, Lachlan, Al, Ewan, Rona, and Niamh, who had come up from the town because Ewan had asked her and because Niamh neverrefused Ewan anything except secrets that belonged to other people.
Al managed the stove. He was making pasta – the big pot, the one that served eight, filled with water and salt and the quiet focus of a man who had always secretly enjoyed feeding people. Al at the stove was Al at his most visible – the physical competence, the economy of movement, the way he handled the pan with the same precision he handled everything. He did not cook often. When he did, the kitchen became his room.
Ewan made coffee. Excellent coffee – the Fixer had opinions about coffee the way the Fixer had opinions about everything, informed and emphatic and delivered with the certainty of a man who believed that hot beverages were a matter of principle. He ground the beans by hand. He timed the water. He served it in the good cups.
Rona critiqued the wine. “This is a fourteen-pound supermarket Rioja,” she said, reading the label with the forensic attention she gave to everything. “It’s fine. It could be better. It could be significantly better.”
“It’s what was in the house,” Al said.
“I’m aware. I’m providing feedback, not criticism.”
Niamh and Catriona sat at the end of the table and reminisced about St.Jude’s – the studio, the classes, Isobel’s corrections, the exact way Isobel would tap your calf with a stick if your turnout was incorrect. Cat spoke about Isobel with the warmth of a woman who had been taught by a great teacher and had carried the teaching into exile. Niamh listened with the quiet attention of a woman who had known both of them – Isobel and Cat – and had kept their secrets with the same discipline.
I sat at the table and I watched. The kitchen was warm. The pasta was cooking. The coffee was excellent. The wine was, as Rona had noted, fine. The evening was ordinary. Theordinariness was the point, because the ordinariness was the thing we were fighting to protect – not the Ledger, not the vault, not the Syndicate’s operational architecture, but this: six people in a kitchen, eating together, talking about nothing, being alive in each other’s company.
The kitchen cleared. Niamh left with Catriona – they were sharing Niamh’s flat for the night, the two of them continuing the conversation that had started at St.Jude’s and had been interrupted by six years of absence. Rona went to her room. The briefcase went with her. Ewan went to his room. Al went to the Hook.
The kitchen was empty. I stayed.
I poured a second cup of tea I did not drink. I sat at the table in the quiet kitchen and I sat with the question I had been avoiding since the foreknowledge reveal.
Is this real, or is this a siege?
Because siege-love is different from peace-love. Siege-love is proximity and adrenaline and the intoxicating clarity of a shared enemy. Siege-love is the warmth of three bodies in a cold study after the world has threatened to end. Siege-love is command and compliance and the handcuffs and the cliff terrace and the urgency of people who might not have tomorrow.
Peace-love is mortgages and arguments about whose turn it is to cook and the slow, unsexy work of being chosen on a Tuesday when nothing is at stake. Peace-love is three men who function as a unit under pressure becoming three men who function as a unit when the pressure stops. Peace-love is wanting all of them on a Sunday afternoon with no threat and nodrama and nothing more exciting than a disagreement about the grocery list.
I did not know if what we had survived peace. I did not know if wanting all of them was generosity or greed. I did not know if the thing we had built would hold without the architecture of crisis to support it.
I sat with this. I did not solve it. Leaving it unsolved was the most honest thing I did all day.
The tea went cold. The kitchen was dark. The AGA ticked.
In the corridor outside the kitchen, Rona stopped. I did not see her. She told me later. She stopped in the dark corridor and she listened to the sound of the kitchen – the AGA, the tick of the clock, the silence of a woman sitting alone with a question that had no answer – and she filed it somewhere she did not usually file things. Somewhere warm. Somewhere that mattered.
She went to her room. She did not say goodnight. The silence she left behind said it for her.
CHAPTER 27
Rona’s Ledger
