Sienna felt it. I watched her feel it. She didn't move and she didn't turn to him and her breath did a small careful thing she shut down almost before it started.
Then Cormac took his hand back like the strap had bitten him, his face closed, the door shut, the whole thing over so fast that if I didn't spend my life learning to see exactly that, I'd have sworn it never happened.
"Good," he said. Flat. To the strap, not to her. "It'll hold."
He turned and left the room.
Sienna picked her fork back up. Her hand was steady. That, more than anything, told me how much it wasn't.
I said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't be a hand on something that needed to stay untouched a while longer. But I held onto it, tucked it into the part of me that had quietly kept count since a Tuesday night in Chicago. Because I'd assumed, the way you assume the weather, that I knew the shape of what was happening in this house. Ronan, who'd carried her for years before he knew she was alive to carry. Me, who'd found her and couldn't seem to put her down. And Cormac, who I'd pegged as the one untouched by it, the one who'd stand at the edge and run the security and feel nothing he couldn't account for on a spreadsheet.
I was wrong about Cormac.
I was almost glad. That surprised me when I noticed it. A different kind of man would have felt something cold move through him at the idea of one more set of hands reaching for a thing he wanted. I waited for the cold and it didn't come. What came instead was closer to relief, and under the relief a thought I didn't fully have words for yet, about how a woman like this was never going to be one man's whole answer, and how the four of us had circled that truth all that time without anyone saying it out loud.
"Eat your eggs," I told her, to have something to say.
"I'm eating your eggs," she said. "Stop narrating it."
Ronan appeared in the doorway with his coat on and his keys in his hand and the look of a man who'd run out of reasons to delay. "Cormac's bringing the second car round. We move in ten." Whatever was on his face he let her see, which was not nothing, him telling her something without spending words he didn't have. "You don't have to do this."
"Yes I do." She stood. She set the empty plate on top of the road map of the place she'd run from, square in the middle of the western counties, like she'd pinned the whole of it down with the one ordinary thing in the room. "My father left those recordsfor a Madigan. There's one Madigan left." She pulled her coat on over the vest Cormac had set to her ribs. "It's me or it's no one, and no one's had fifteen years."
Nobody argued. There was no argument in it.
We went out into the gray. The wind off the cliffs had the wet edge it got in October, the one that found the gaps in your coat and reminded you the sea was right there and didn't care about any of us. The second car came round the side of the house with Cormac at the wheel, his eyes already doing the thing they did, the slow continuous sweep of a man who'd decided a long time ago that the cost of looking foolish was always lower than the cost of missing the one thing that mattered.
Sienna stopped at the car door. She looked back at the house once, the gray stone, the tall windows, the two hundred years of someone else's family pressed into every wall of it, then past it, west, toward the road that climbed down off the coast and ran inland toward Galway and everything she'd buried there.
"Whatever's out there," she said, mostly to herself, "it's been waiting longer than I have."
Then she got in the car, and we drove toward it.
22
SIENNA
Galway hadn't changed enough.
That was what got me first, before the solicitor, before any of it. I'd built the whole drive up in my head as a thing I had to survive, and then we came down off the coast road into the city and it was just there, same as it ever was. The same gray stone. The same gulls being assholes over the same harbor. The same light coming flat off the bay, like the place had spent a decade and a half waiting around for me to get over myself and come back.
I'd done recon here. Twice, years ago, in a different coat with a different name, close enough to the truth that it scared me and never close enough to touch it. I never once went to the solicitor. Couldn't. Walking into Hartigan and Burke and saying the word Madigan out loud would have lit a flare over my head for anyone still watching, and someone was always still watching. So I circled it for a decade and a half like a dog that wanted the thing on the table and knew what happened to dogs that jumped.
Now Cormac parked two streets back and Ronan walked me in.
The office was up a narrow stair over a shop that sold wool nobody under seventy was buying. A brass plate gone green atthe edges. Inside it smelled like paper and old radiator heat and the particular nothing-smell of a place where serious money got moved very quietly. A girl at the front desk asked if I had an appointment.
"Tell Mr. Burke that a Madigan is here about her father's file," I said.
She went still for a second. Then she got up fast and didn't walk so much as flee through the back door, and I stood there with my heartbeat going hard against the vest Cormac had strapped to my ribs, and I thought, here we go.
Burke was old. Older than my father would have been. He came out of the back with his glasses pushed up on his head, stopped dead three feet in front of me, and just took in my face for a long time, the way the recordings had taught me people looked at me now, like they were doing sums, and the sums kept coming out to a dead man.
"Your eyes," he said finally. Quiet. "God in heaven. You have his eyes."
"I've been told."
"He said you might come." Burke's voice did something then, went rough at the bottom. "He said it could be twenty years. He said if a woman ever came in here with the Madigan green and asked about her father's file, I was to verify her and hand her everything and then forget she'd ever stood in my office." He took his glasses off his head entirely, like he needed to see me with nothing in the way. "All this time I've kept that file. Checked every quarter that it was still where it should be. I'd nearly let myself believe no one was coming."
