Page 41 of The Dangerous Dance

"Sunday next," she says into my shoulder. "Come to the compound. Or don't. But you'd be welcome."

"I'll think about it."

"That means yes in her language," she tells Liam, who is leaning against the kitchen counter watching this with an expression I can't fully read from this angle but which contains something quiet and careful.

"It means I'll think about it," I say.

She grins and goes.

Ailish finishes her tea in approximately four minutes, asks Liam two questions about the Italian meeting that has been postponed again and which she clearly has opinions about, receives two answers that she also clearly has opinions about, and then stands and buttons her coat and looks at me once more.

"He's not easy," she says. Not an apology. Not a warning. Just a fact.

"I know," I say.

"I know you know." She picks up her bag. "That's not the part I was worried about."

She leaves.

The door closes.

The flat is quiet in the way it hasn't been for five days, which is the quiet of two people rather than four, and the way it contracts back down — just this, just us, the laundromat and the car park and the yellow light — does something to the atmosphere that I feel before I think about it.

I am irritated, and I am irritated specifically, and I let myself be irritated for approximately twenty minutes before I do anything with it.

What I'm irritated about is this: Ailish knows where this flat is. Mackenzie knows where this flat is. Roise knows where this flat is. Conor presumably knows in the general sense of having been told not to flag it without knowing why. The Irish operative watching the tracker signal in Astoria knows that signal hasn't moved in five days and is presumably wondering about it. And Viktor, who I have been managing through brief and carefully calibrated contact that reveals nothing, is going to notice the management eventually and when he does he is going to begin looking for what it's managing around.

Which means this flat, which was private, is progressively less private. Which means the thing that has been happening in it, which was contained, is progressively less contained. Which means the thing I've been doing — which is existing in a particular quality of proximity to a particular person without fully accounting for what I'm going to do about it — has an external clock on it that I've been ignoring.

I am irritated because ignoring clocks is not something I do. I am my father's daughter. I know what happens to people who stop paying attention to the time.

I go to the window.

Liam is at the kitchen table with the Cork supplementals, which he's been working through since Ailish left, and the flat has settled into the working quiet I've become familiar with — the silence of two people occupying the same space without needing to fill it. He hasn't spoken since the door closed. He has the focused stillness of someone who is working and also thinking about something else.

He is thinking about sending me back.

I know this the way I know most things — not because he's said it, but because the room has a specific quality today that it didn't have yesterday. Something about Ailish's visit shifted it. Something about the two questions about the Italian meeting and the two answers she had opinions about. He is reassessing the operational wisdom of what he's been doing, which is what I would do in his position and which is correct and which I understand intellectually.

I still don't like it.

I turn from the window.

He looks up from the supplementals.

We look at each other across the flat, which is not a large flat, and the quiet does the thing it's been doing with increasing frequency where it becomes a presence in the room rather than the absence of sound.

"You're thinking about sending me back," I say.

He sets down his pen. "I'm thinking about what comes next."

"Those are the same thing."

"Not necessarily." He leans back. "There are options between keeping you here indefinitely and sending you back to a handler who is going to ask questions you're not going to want to answer."

"Such as."

"Such as you going back to the apartment in Astoria under the understanding that you continue providing me with what you know about Viktor's timeline, and in exchange I provide you with protection that doesn't require you to be in this flat." He says it evenly, practically, the operational version of a negotiation that is also several other things. "You maintain your cover. You keep Viktor at a distance. We work out a communication protocol."