The answer came fast, and I didn't like it.
Because he was coming back.
Not tonight. Tonight he'd do exactly what I'd do. Somewhere private, a phone call, tell whoever needed telling, regroup. Tomorrow was the different story. Tomorrow, or the day after, he'd come back to Madigan's, and he wouldn't be alone, and he wouldn't pretend.
Which meant I had a window.
I turned to the wall. To the timeline. Every thread I'd pulled, every connection I'd mapped, every scrap I'd carried from city tocity, all the slow patient work of a woman with nothing but time and a reason to spend it.
I was so close.
I'd been so careful.
I pressed my palms flat on the desk and looked at my father's face and thought about what he'd tell me to do right now, if he were anywhere I could reach.
What was the first thing he ever taught me?
Don't run until you know what you're running from.
I looked at the door. Then the photograph. Then the timeline on the wall.
I stayed exactly where I was.
Because here was the truth of it. I'd been running a long time, and I was tired. Tired of the aliases and the moving and the building and the losing and the starting over. Tired of living in the gap between who I was and who I had to pretend to be. Tired of being the only person left alive who knew Sienna Madigan was still breathing.
And because, if I was being honest in the small hours, the way I'm sometimes honest when there's nobody around to perform for, there was a crack in the thing I'd built my whole life on.
All that time, one conclusion, and not a single piece of evidence that ever proved it. All that time pointing every arrow at the Kerrigan family and watching them refuse to act like guilty men. All that time waiting for the one thing that would make it certain, and never once finding it.
The man tonight had looked at me like I was something precious that had been lost.
Not like a man with blood on his hands.
I turned the photograph face down.
I wouldn't decide anything tonight. Tonight I'd sit with what I knew and what I didn't. I wouldn't run and I wouldn't act.I'd do nothing but breathe through the fact that everything had changed without asking me first.
Tomorrow I'd work out what came next.
I pulled my knees up into the desk chair, the way I used to sit in the dark of the panic room under my childhood home while the world came apart above me, and I looked down at the street.
Somewhere out there, a man with blue eyes was making a phone call.
And for the first time in fifteen years, I wasn't sure I wanted to be gone before whoever he called got here.
5
CORMAC
Two hours in the same doorway.
Waiting is most of the job. Men romanticize the rest. The violence. The leverage. The one decision made without flinching. Those are real. But mostly the work is this. Stand somewhere. Watch. Let the thing you need come up out of the dark on its own.
I'm patient the way some men are tall. Not a virtue. Not earned. A fact.
It makes me good at the job.
It makes me hard to know.
