Page 144 of The Dangerous Dance

I meet her halfway.

For a moment we are just — here. In the specific way of people who have arrived somewhere they've been trying to get to, which requires a moment of staying there before anything else.

"Can you move," I say.

"Yes. The shoulder is⁠—"

"Later. Move now."

She moves.

We go back through the corridor and up the stairwell and through the roof and into the cold of the Brooklyn night, and below on the service road the controlled chaos of the operation is resolving into the specific quality of something that has gone correctly — Declan's voice, and the Rosso four, and Conor's signal through the earpiece that says clear.

Clear.

She is beside me on the roof with the cold around us and the city beyond the building doing its indifferent thing and I look at her in the specific way I have of looking at things I've decided to let myself look at, and she looks back.

"Mackenzie," she says.

"Fine. Ailish. The arm is broken but she's — fine."

She exhales. The first full exhale I've seen from her since the corridor, the specific exhale of someone whose body has been holding something and is now releasing it.

"Dara," she says.

"At the compound. Since yesterday morning."

Something moves through her face. "She came."

"Of course she came."

She looks at the city.

"Liam," she says.

"Yes."

"I told you I'd come back."

"I know. I came to make sure."

She looks at me with the expression that lives where the unlabeled section used to be. "That's not what we agreed."

"No," I say. "It isn't."

She holds my gaze for a moment.

"I know," she says. And the way she says it carries everything — not the flat factual version, not the managed version. The full version. The one that means: I know, and I'm not angry, and I understand what it means that you came, and I'm going to tell you all of that later when we're not on a rooftop in Brooklyn.

"Can we go home," she says.

"Yes," I say.

We go down from the roof.

Below, Declan is at the car. He sees her and he nods, once, with the specific acknowledgment of someone who has spent thirty-six hours doing what he did and is glad to see the reason for it standing upright.

She nods back.