Page 107 of The Dangerous Dance

"Liam," I say.

He turns around.

I come around the table and I stand behind him and I put my hands on his shoulders, which are, as observed, carrying approximately the entire day in them. He goes still in the way he goes still when something catches him off guard — not the guarded stillness but the receptive kind, the kind that means he's allowing it.

I work through the tension with the focused attention I bring to things that require precision, which this does. Ballet training produces, as a side effect, an understanding of how bodies carry stress and where they put it, and his body is putting it in the specific places that come from sitting at a desk and standing in meeting rooms and conducting the kind of sustained performance of authority that this life requires constantly.

He doesn't say anything.

I don't say anything.

The kitchen is quiet and outside Ciarán is presumably doing his rotation and the fig tree is being bare and reproachful in the garden and the city is doing its city thing beyond the walls.

After a while he says, without turning around: "The security detail."

"Yes," I say.

"Two of them. Not four. And Ciarán doesn't knock unless there's something that requires knowing."

"And I can go to the ballet studio," I say. "With two of them. Not inside. Outside."

A pause. "Yes."

"And the garden," I say. "On my own."

"The garden is enclosed. Yes."

I work through a knot below his left shoulder blade that has the specific quality of something that's been there for longer than today. "All right," I say.

"All right you accept it or all right you're still angry about it."

"All right I accept the revision," I say. "I'm still reserving judgment on the rest."

"That's fair," he says.

I work through the knot.

He exhales — not dramatically, just the specific exhale of someone whose body has released something it's been holding, which is the thing that happens when you work through the right point with the right pressure.

"You're good at that," he says.

"I'm good at most things," I say.

"I know," he says. "It's one of your more exhausting qualities."

I stop.

He turns around and looks at me with the expression that is not quite the almost-smile and is fully the actual smile, which is rare enough that I've started cataloguing it with the involuntary attention I bring to rare things.

"I'm not exhausting," I say.

"You decoded the patrol pattern on the first morning," he says. "Ciarán told me."

"Of course I decoded⁠—"

"And you reorganized the kitchen."

"The previous organization was⁠—"