My phone rang. Tiernan. He kept his own hours and had never once apologized for it, so the hour didn't worry me. I picked up. Told him it was late, which it was, and that he'd found something, because Tiernan didn't ring at that hour for anything less. He let both of those go by without a word.
"We need to talk," he said. "You'll want to be sitting down."
"I'm already sitting."
"Then stay there."
He went quiet after that, and the quiet was the thing that got me. Tiernan always has his next word ready. This time he didn't, and whatever sat in that gap reached through the phone and took hold of me by the sternum. I went still and waited.
"I found her," he said.
Three words.
I didn't speak.
"Ronan." Careful, in a way Tiernan almost never is. "You there?"
"Say it again."
A breath. "I found her. Sienna. She's alive, she's in Chicago, and she's alright. I'm looking at a sign over a bar that says Madigan's. She doesn't know who I am."
The fire popped behind me. I noticed my hand had gone white around the phone, and I let it go, finger by finger, the way a person walks themselves back from an edge.
Sienna Madigan was alive.
"How sure are you?" My voice came out level. I don't know how.
"Her eyes."
And that was enough, because I was the only person I'd ever described them to. One night, too much of her father's own whiskey in me, the thing I keep locked leaking out at the seams. Green so dark it read as brown until the light found it, and then it went the exact color of the twelve-year held up to a lamp. Her father had them. So did every photograph I owned, the color going gold at the edges with age. You don't forget a thing you spent that long refusing to let yourself picture.
"I'm certain," Tiernan said.
I stood up. I didn't decide to. My body did it because it was the only thing left to do with what was moving through me. I crossed to the window and breathed slow through my nose, theway my father taught me when I was small and the world got too big to stand inside of.
She was alive.
"Where's she been?"
"Don't know yet. Chicago four years at least, that's how long the bar's been open. Living as Claire Byrne. She built the whole place on Madigan and Sons. Stocks it, pours it, hung the name over the door where the whole street can read it." A pause. "I can't tell if that's brave or stupid."
"It's both."
Quiet on the line. "Yeah," he said. "It is."
I pressed my palm flat to the cold glass and looked at the black line of the cliffs. Somewhere past all that water was a woman I'd been promised before either of us could talk, mourned without ever earning the right to mourn her, alive and pouring whiskey and not knowing that as of tonight her hiding was finished.
She didn't know what was coming. I had a small window to decide how it went before she got a say in it.
I already knew.
"I'm coming to Chicago," I said.
"Figured." No argument. It's why he's one of two people alive I trust without conditions. "When?"
"First flight. Book it. You and Cormac stay near the bar. Don't approach her, don't let her catch you watching."
"Understood."
