She pushed eggs around the plate. "What am I, Tiernan?"
"Hungry, by the look of it. Eat."
"I'm serious." She put the fork down. "A few days ago I slept with you. Last night I..." She stopped, color coming up her neck, and I enjoyed that more than I should have. "And I don't feel guilty, which is the part that's bothering me. I keep waiting to feel like I've done something wrong, something cheap, and it's not coming, and I don't know what that makes me."
I sat down across from her. I took her good hand off the table and held it, because some things you say better with your hands than your mouth, and I was good with both.
"It makes you honest," I said. "That's all. You're not feeling guilty because there's nothing to feel guilty about, and your gut knows it even if all those years of being alone are telling you there's supposed to be a catch." I ran my thumb over her knuckles. "Nobody in this house is keeping score. I'm notcounting. Ronan's not counting. Whatever this is becoming, and it's becoming something, I think we all feel it, there's no version of it where you're the one who did wrong by wanting more than the world said you were allowed. You spent fifteen years with nothing. You're allowed to want. You're allowed to want more than one good thing at once. That's not greed. That's a woman who went hungry a long time finally sitting down at a full table."
Her eyes went bright and she blinked it back hard, the way she did, the five-second rule she didn't know I'd noticed.
"You're going to make me cry over eggs," she said.
"They're very good eggs. Worth crying over." I lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles, easy, warm, and I felt her settle. "Eat. And the next time you're trying to work out what you are, the answer's simple. You're ours. However that shakes out. You're ours, and we're glad of it, and there's no catch."
She ate. She let me refill her tea. We sat in the kitchen in the gray light and it was easy, it was so easy, and easy was the thing I was for in this family. The warmth. The place a person got to set the weight down for an hour.
But I read people. It's the condition I can't switch off. And even sitting there in the warm of it, I clocked the gap in the picture.
Three of us had quietly become a unit by now. One of us hadn't. Cormac changed her dressing that morning with eight words and steady hands and then went back to the maps. He didn't look at her at breakfast, not once, and the not-looking was so deliberate it was practically a shout. I'd seen the thing in him in the car. I'd seen it again over her vest. He felt it harder than any of us, I'd have put money on it, the quiet ones always did, and he'd built a wall around it he thought the rest of us couldn't see.
I didn't say anything to her about it. It wasn't mine to say. But I kept it, the way I keep everything that matters about the peoplewho are mine, because a unit with a wall down the middle of it isn't a unit yet. It's three men and a holdout, and sooner or later that wall was going to have to come down, or come apart.
Later, I thought. Galway nearly killed her yesterday, and her uncle turned out to be Judas, and she still smiled at my eggs. Let her have the easy hour.
The hard ones were coming. They always were.
I put more bread in the pan.
29
SIENNA
The package waited on the kitchen table on the third morning, and the fact that it was on the kitchen table was the whole message.
I understood that before I understood anything else about it. Cormac had turned the Kerrigan estate into a fortress over those three days, motion sensors and new men on the gates and a sweep pattern he ran himself at hours that didn't repeat. Nothing came through that door he didn't know the weight and origin of. And yet there it was. A small brown parcel, my name on it, the real one, Sienna Madigan, in block capitals, sitting dead center on the table where I ate my eggs every morning, like somebody had set it down there with my breakfast.
Cormac was already standing over it when I came down. He didn't touch it. His face had a stillness on it, the bad kind.
"It's clean," he said. "I checked it six ways. No device, no powder, nothing that goes bang or seeps." He didn't move. "It came in with the grocery delivery. The driver's a man we've used for eleven years. He doesn't know how it got in his van. I believe him, which is the part I don't like." He looked at me. "Someone put it in a vehicle we trust, through a man we trust, to land it on the one table in this house that's supposed to be safe. They'renot trying to hurt you with what's in the box. They're telling you there is no table that's safe. Do you understand the message before you open it?"
"I understand it," I said. My voice was steady. My hands, when I reached for the parcel, were steady too, because they'd had a lot of practice. "They want me to know they can reach me anywhere. Got it. Message received." I picked it up. "Now let's see what they spent the reach on."
I opened it.
Inside, in a nest of plain tissue, was my father's ring.
I knew it the way I knew his handwriting, the way I knew Eamon's. The Madigan signet, gold gone soft at the edges from three generations of being worn, the crest worn down that I used to trace with my thumb when he held me as a child, the small nick on the band from a thing he never explained. He wore it the night the cliffs burned. He wore it when he shoved me through the gap in the wall and told me to run and didn't follow. He was wearing it when he died.
It should have burned with him. It should have been ash, or on a hand they buried, except there was so little left to bury that there wasn't a hand. There was a closed box, a priest, and a fifteen-year-old who wasn't allowed to look.
Somebody had taken it off my father.
Somebody had been close enough to his body in that fire to work a ring off a dead man's hand. They kept it for fifteen years, and now they'd set it in tissue paper and walked it through three layers of a fortress to put it on my breakfast table. The message under the message was so clear it stopped my heart for a beat.
I was there that night, and I never left. I've kept this the whole time, waiting for the day I'd get to put it in your hand and watch your face.
There was a card. One line, no signature, printed rather than written, because they were careful. They were always careful.
