Page 40 of The Dangerous Dance

Something moves through his expression that he doesn't quite manage to contain, which I file in the growing collection of things I notice about him that are not operational and which I have stopped pretending are operational.

"Right," he says.

"Also," Mackenzie continues, with the air of someone who has been waiting to say this, "you have a lot of women around you. Roise, me, Ailish, and now—" She gestures at me. "You're building quite the collection."

Roise makes a small, dry sound that is almost a laugh.

Liam looks at his sister with the expression of a man who has returned from a long day to find his kitchen has reorganized itself without him.

"There's nothing with Ailish," he says.

"I know," Mackenzie says. "I'm just saying." She stands and takes her mug to the sink. "You said nothing about the other two."

He opens his mouth.

He closes it.

He looks at me.

I look at him over the rim of my mug with the most neutral expression I have available, which is fairly neutral, but which has — I am aware, because Mackenzie has made me aware — something in it that the neutral doesn't entirely cover.

He goes to make coffee.

Mackenzie, behind him, looks at me and raises her eyebrows once.

I look at the table.

But I'm almost smiling, and she sees it, and she looks extremely pleased with herself about it, and I find that I don't entirely mind.

CHAPTER 16

Nadia

Ailish arrives on a Sunday morning in a car she parks with the efficiency of someone who parks in places she's not supposed to and has stopped apologizing for it. She comes upstairs and fills the doorway the way competent women fill doorways — without drama, without announcement, just with the quality of someone who belongs wherever they decide to stand.

She looks at me the way everyone in Liam's orbit looks at me the first time, which is the look of someone running a rapid threat assessment while performing something that reads as neutral. She does it faster than most. Ten seconds, maybe, and then she moves past it into a functional register that I find, unexpectedly, easier to deal with than the assessments that run longer.

"Ailish," Liam says, from the kitchen.

"You look terrible," she tells him. "How long have you been in this flat."

"Five days."

"You look like seven." She sets her bag on the table with the ease of someone who has been in this space before, which she has — I can see it in the familiarity of her movements. She already knows where things are. She turns to me. "Nadia."

"Ailish," I say.

"I've heard about you."

"I assumed."

"Not all of it's bad," she says, which is the most honest possible version of that sentence and which she delivers with a directness I find I like. Not warmth, not hostility. Just the flat factual version of a situation assessed and reported. "Mackenzie says you helped with the Cork correspondence."

"Roise did most of it."

"Roise is good at most things." She goes to the kettle without asking if she can. "She's less good at some others." She says this without looking at either of us, which is deliberate. This is skill. I catalogue it.

Mackenzie appears from the bedroom with her bag over one shoulder and the specific energy of someone about to be extracted from a situation they're not fully ready to leave. She hugs me before she goes, which I did not anticipate and which I handle by standing still and then, after a half-second that I hope reads as composure rather than surprise, returning it.