For fifteen years I carried two dead men I loved and one I hated. And in the space of an afternoon at a dining table, one of the loved ones turned into the hated one, and the grave I'd put him in turned into a story somebody told a terrified child.
"Get Ronan," I said. "Get Tiernan. They need to see this."
Cormac stood.
"Cormac." He stopped. I made myself say it, because it was true, and because there was finally a room full of people who'd help me carry a thing, and I was done carrying everything alone. "Thank you. For not pretending it was simpler than it is. Everybody my whole life has tried to make it simpler than it is. You didn't."
He took me in, the door very slightly open, and then he closed it the gentle way, which was worse than the hard way.
"It's never simpler than it is," he said, and went to get the others.
27
RONAN
I found her in my study at one in the morning, and I should have left her there.
That was the thought I had in the doorway. Leave her be. She'd had the worst day a person could have that didn't end with them in the ground, the kind grave turned to a question, the loved uncle turned into the hand that opened the doors, all her grief revealed as a thing she'd worn for a man who didn't deserve it. She didn't need me. She needed quiet and the dark and to be left alone to put herself back together the way she'd done it since she was fifteen.
But she stood at my window with her back to the door and the moon doing what it did off the water, and she said, without turning around, "I know you're there. You breathe like a big man trying to be quiet. You're all rubbish at it."
So I didn't leave.
I came in and shut the door. She still didn't turn. She had her arms wrapped around herself, the dressed one careful against her stomach, and she stared out at the black water like it owed her something.
"He used to take me down to the harbor," she said. "Eamon. When my father worked and my mother had her headaches.He'd buy me chips and let me throw them at the gulls and tell me which of the men on the docks were lying about their catch and how he could tell." A breath. "I learned to read people from a man who was lying to my whole family the entire time. That's the part I can't get the shape of. He was good at it because he meant it. The kindness was real. That's how he got close enough to do it."
"Sienna."
She went still.
I hadn't planned to say it. It came out of me the way the truth does when you've held it long enough, on its own schedule, deciding for itself that now was the time. I'd been careful the whole time. Claire when others were in the room. Nothing at all when it was just us, because I didn't trust what my own mouth would do with her real name. It had sat in me like a swallowed coal the whole time, the name I grieved at an empty grave, and it finally got loose at one in the morning in a dark room because I was tired and so was she, the day having burned all the careful out of both of us.
She turned around then.
"Say it again," she said.
"Sienna."
"You've never said it. Not once, this whole time." Her voice went strange. "Fifteen years. I'm Claire. I've been Claire so long that Sienna feels like a girl I read about once. And you say it like..." She stopped. "Like you know her."
"I was meant to," I said.
And because I'd started, because the coal was out, I gave her the rest of it.
"Our fathers made an arrangement. You and me. I was nineteen, you were small, it was the kind of thing families like ours did, stitching two houses together with a promise neither child got a vote in. I didn't think much of it at the time. Youwere a name in my father's mouth, a Madigan girl down the coast I'd marry one day when you were grown. An arrangement set aside for a future I assumed would take care of itself." I made myself hold her eyes while I said it, because she deserved to be looked at while I told her. "We met once. You were seven. There was a christening, two families in a cold church, and you spent the whole time trying to feed communion wafers to a dog somebody had tied up outside. Your mother kept hauling you back in by your collar, and you kept marching straight back out. I remember thinking,God help the man who's promised that one."
Something cracked in her face. Not breaking. The opposite. Something letting go.
"I don't remember," she whispered.
"You were seven. You had no reason to." I came a step closer. "And then the cliffs burned, and they told me the Madigan girl was dead, and I stood at a grave with no one in it and buried the idea of you. Not the woman. I never had the woman. I buried the promise. The future I'd assumed would take care of itself. I decided that day that wanting things was for men who got to keep them, and I wasn't going to be one, and I was very, very good at it for a long time." My voice had gone rough at the bottom and I let it. "And then Tiernan rang me from a bar in Chicago and said your name, your real one, and every bit of that careful work came undone in about four seconds, because it turned out I hadn't buried you at all. I'd just been waiting. I didn't even know I was doing it. All those years, waiting for a woman I'd told myself was a closed grave."
She crossed the room.
I'll be honest about it, even to myself. I didn't reach for her first. She came to me. She put her good hand flat on my chest, over the place where the thing I'd buried refused to stay buried,and she looked up at me with the Madigan green that started all of this, and she said, "Then stop waiting."
I kissed her.
