Page 154 of The Dangerous Dance

Ailish's arm heals.

She is, as she predicted, fine. She manages the cast for six weeks with the specific competence she brings to everything inconvenient, and when it comes off she flexes her fingers once and goes back to driving herself wherever she needs to go without asking anyone for anything.

Declan is at the compound the day the cast comes off.

He is there when she comes back from the hospital and he is in the kitchen, which is not where he usually is, and he has made coffee, which is not something he usually does, and he hands her a cup when she comes through the door and he says something I don't hear because I am on the other side of the building.

Whatever he says produces a silence that Mackenzie, who is nearby and who tells me about it later with the expression of someone who has been waiting for a specific thing to happen and has watched it begin, describes as the specific silence of two people deciding something without words.

I file this in the section I've designated for things that are not mine to open yet and which will open in their own time.

Conor takes Mackenzie to dinner on a Friday in February.

Not operationally. Just — dinner. She mentions it to me the following Monday with the elaborate casualness of someone who has prepared the casualness carefully and is hoping it lands as genuine, and I receive it with the equally elaborate casualness of someone who noticed something on a Sunday night in a hospital corridor four months ago and has been waiting.

"Good," I say.

"It was just dinner," she says.

"I know."

She looks at me.

I look at her.

We both pretend we're not having the conversation we're having, which is the correct approach for a Monday morning, and move on.

Dara goes home in March.

Not because she's been forced to — the Vore's dismantling has removed the operational pressure that brought her here, and the choice is genuinely hers. Nadia tells me about it the evening before Dara's flight, sitting in the kitchen of the house in Carroll Gardens with her hands around her tea and the specific quality of someone who has accepted something and is sitting with the shape of it.

"She wants to dance again," Nadia says. "There's a company in Prague that she's been in contact with. Small, contemporary. The knee can manage it if she's careful." She looks at the window. "She said New York was never going to be hers the way it became mine."

"Did she say that. That it became yours."

"She said it became mine. She said I should stop being surprised by it."

I look at her.

She looks at the window.

"She's right," I say.

"She usually is. It's one of her most exhausting qualities."

She says it with the almost-smile, and then the full smile, and I note both the way I've been noting them since November, which is with the involuntary attention of someone who has stopped pretending it's involuntary.

The wedding is in April on the Amalfi coast.

Gianna's hotel — Luce e Mare, light and sea — closes for four days for the occasion, which Gianna announces is not a sacrifice because she is the one who suggested it and nothing she suggests is a sacrifice. Finn takes the announcement with the ease of a man who has learned that disagreeing with Gianna on matters of hospitality produces no useful outcome.

The coast in April has the quality of somewhere that has been waiting for you specifically — warm without being committed to warmth, the sea impossibly blue, the kind of light that makes everything look like it was arranged rather than simply existing.

Nadia's mother comes from Moscow.

She is small and dark-haired and she looks at her daughter with the specific expression of someone seeing something they weren't sure they'd see and have decided to simply receive it without analysis. She takes my hand when Nadia introduces us and she holds it for a moment and she says, in English that is careful and deliberate: "Take care of each other."

"Yes," I say. To both of them.