Page 152 of The Dangerous Dance

In the lobby she says: "Declan."

"He'll say it. In his own time."

She nods. "Ferrante surprised me."

"Ferrante surprises everyone. He's been doing it for thirty years."

She almost smiles. The almost-smile that I've been cataloguing for two months with the involuntary attention I bring to rare things.

We go through the lobby doors into the winter city, which is doing its usual thing, and she stops on the pavement and looks up at the sky, which is the flat grey of a city that has decided on winter without announcing it.

"Liam," she says.

"Yes."

"The Vore. When it's done." She looks at the sky. "What does done look like for me."

I look at her. At the question that has been underneath everything since a safehouse above a laundromat, since a farmers market on a Saturday morning, since a warehouse floor in November.

"Whatever you want it to look like."

She looks at me. "That's a significant amount of latitude."

"Yes. It is."

She holds my gaze for a moment. The city moves around us, indifferent and continuous, and she stands on the pavement looking at me with the expression that lives in the place where the unlabeled section used to be.

"I want to stay," she says. "Not as an asset. Not as a protected position. As—" She finds the word. "Part of it. The thing you're building."

"You're already part of it. You've been part of it since you handed me a receiver in a warehouse."

She looks at me.

"Stay," I say. "Because you want to. Because it's yours as much as it's mine." I hold her gaze. "That's what done looks like."

She is quiet for a moment.

She does something I haven't seen from her in all the months of cataloguing her expressions and reading the room she inhabits. She smiles. Fully. Without the qualifier, without the almost, without the performance of something other than the thing itself.

Just the smile.

"All right," she says.

We walk back toward the car and the city moves around us and I think about Thursday and the Moscow contact and the Antwerp shell and the full operational plan that needs to exist by next week, and underneath all of that, threaded through it, the thing I've been carrying since a warehouse floor in November that has been looking for the right moment and has, I think, found it.

I stop.

She stops beside me.

"What," she says.

I look at her on the pavement with the flat grey sky above and the city doing its indifferent thing around us and I think about everything I could say about timing and conditions and the correct moment for this kind of thing, all of which I discard because conditions are never correct and timing is always complicated and the correct moment is the one where the thing is true and you say it.

"Marry me," I say.

She looks at me.

"Not because of the operation. Not because of the alliance or the Vore or the Italian partnership or any of it. Because you came back from Viktor's compound and you came back to me and you've been coming back to me since November and I would like you to keep doing that with the formal weight of a promise behind it." I hold her gaze. "Marry me."