She was quiet.
"That's a very soft reason for a man in your line of work."
"I'm full of soft reasons. Widely considered a liability for it."
The warm thing again, nearer a smile than before.
"You found me," she said. "After all this time nobody did."
"I found a bar with your father's whiskey behind it. I'd run that name into the ground for years, expecting the usual. Three lads from Cork and a coincidence of spelling." This time I let myself look at her, because some things you say to the person or you don't say them. "What I didn't expect was for it to be you. That part I didn't engineer. That part knocked the wind out of me and hasn't given it back."
"What did you find," she said. "When you looked up."
She knew exactly what she was asking. She asked it anyway.
"You," I said.
The fire shifted in the grate. The room was very warm.
"I've been angry a long time," she said, to her mug, to the space between us. "Anger's useful. I burn it like other people burn fuel. Put it in, go." She turned the mug in her hands. "I came here, and Ronan sat beside me and said nothing, and that was harder to manage than the anger ever was."
"Being looked after is harder than being alone," I said. "When you've been alone long enough."
"How would you know?"
"Because I watched Ronan be alone for years. And Cormac. I'm the one who held the shape of a family around two men who'd rather carry everything themselves." I stopped. "Not the same as what you've had. I know it's not. But I know what it looks like from the outside."
"You take care of them."
"I try."
"That's the job you actually do here. Not the deals. Not the smoothing over. Them."
Being read that accurately did something to the inside of my chest I was going to have to manage.
"Both," I said. "It's both."
She nodded, slow, taking it in and putting it somewhere.
We sat in the warm with the tea and the low fire, and the quiet changed under us. I'd been in enough rooms to feel the exact second one stops being about the words in it. This had been in the air since the bar in Chicago, low and steady. Through the confrontation. Through the dinner she'd pretended not to feel it at. Through a whole week of near-misses in doorways and over case files, both of us too disciplined to name it. I'd told myself I was being patient. Really I'd been running on it like fuel and calling it patience, every shared meal and every conversation and every time I made myself not reach for her because the hour hadn't come.
It had come.
"Tiernan," she said.
"Yeah."
She set her mug down.
"I haven't let myself want anything in a long time." Her expression sharpened, precise, the look of a person deciding to say a true thing out loud. "Wanting felt dangerous. Like a thing that would slow me down." A beat. "It's been getting harder to remember why. Somewhere around the third time I caught myself waiting for you to walk into a room." Her jaw set, the way it did right before she did something that cost her. "I want."
The word sat there, unfinished and loaded, in the warm air.
"I know," I said.
I stood. I came around to her side of the table slow, the way a person moves toward something they don't want to startle, leaving her every second she needed to change her mind, to sayno, to put the walls back up. She didn't move away. When I stopped beside her chair she tipped her head up at me with the face of a woman who'd decided something and wasn't going to undecide it.
I held out my hand.
