Page 56 of The Dangerous Dance

This is what it's been like for four days, and I find — with a degree of surprise that I note and then accept — that I like it. Not simply tolerate it. Actually like it, which is not a thing I say easily about working situations, having spent most of my life in working situations that required performing a version of myself rather than just being a version of myself.

With Mackenzie I can be — approximately — the version that knows things and says them directly and doesn't manage what she's thinking about what I'm saying. She takes the information and she uses it and she doesn't look at me with the assessment quality that everyone else in this house does, which is probably because she did her assessment early and has moved past it into something more functional.

Roise comes at eleven.

She comes three mornings out of five, which I have noticed, and the mornings she comes she works at the far end of the table from me with the deliberate professional ease of someone who has decided on an approach and is executing it. The approach is: competent, warm to Mackenzie, correct to me, entirely opaque about anything interior.

I match the approach. We work in the same room without incident. This is, I tell myself, a satisfactory arrangement.

The problem is that on the mornings she comes, Liam stops by more frequently.

I don't think he does this deliberately. I think he comes by the office several times a day regardless, to check in with Mackenzie or to pull a file or to ask about the status of something he's tracking, and on the mornings Roise is here he simply — encounters her as part of those visits, and they interact with the specific efficiency of two people who know how to work together and have been doing it for long enough that the working together is easy.

It's the ease I can't be entirely neutral about.

Not the content of their interactions, which are professional and brief and contain nothing I could reasonably object to. The ease. The particular quality of people who know each other's rhythms and fit into them without effort, who communicate in the shorthand of established familiarity, who don't have to think about how to be in the same space.

I have been in this operation for approximately two months. They have been in the same working relationship for years.

I know this. I apply the logic of it consistently and correctly.

And then Liam comes in at half past eleven and asks Roise about the Galway-7 follow-up, and she pulls it up in twelve seconds because she already knew he'd ask and she'd prepared it, and they talk about it for four minutes with the economy of people who are fluent in each other, and I look at the Brennan tab on my screen and I read the same paragraph three times without retaining it.

"You're doing the face," Mackenzie says, without looking up.

"I'm not making a face."

"The controlled one. The one where the control is too consistent. Most people's expressions shift every few seconds naturally. Yours gets very still when you're managing something."

I look at my screen. "I'm reading."

"You've been reading the same section since he came in."

Liam is still talking to Roise at the far end of the table. "I'm being thorough," I say.

"You're being thorough about something you told me was resolved forty minutes ago." She looks up. "Nadia."

I meet her eyes.

She says nothing. She doesn't have to. The expression on her face is the one that contains several things she's decided not to say, all of which she knows I know, and what she is doing is giving me the room to decide what to do with the knowledge rather than making the decision for me. This is an advanced form of the thing she does and I appreciate it even when I find it inconvenient.

"I'm fine," I say.

"I know," she says. "That's not what I was going to say."

"What were you going to say."

She looks at her screen. "That the Brennan tab could use another pass on the 2022 communications. Something about the frequency feels off." She pulls up the tab in question and turns her screen slightly toward me. "Here. What do you see."

She's giving me something to do with my attention that isn't the other end of the table. I recognize this. I take it.

"The frequency drops in March," I say. "Consistently. Every year, March. Which means it's tied to something seasonal rather than something operational." I look at the pattern. "Does Brennan have family in Ireland? The Republic?"

"A sister in Cork," Mackenzie says.

"He goes home in March. He's out of the information network for two to three weeks annually, which means Connolly had a recurring gap in Brennan's data. He'd have to fill it from another source." I sit back. "What other sources was Connolly working?"

We follow the thread. By the time I look up, Roise has gone and Liam is at the door of the office looking at me with an expression that I've started to recognize — the one he gets when he's seen something he's decided to be amused about, which is a specific form of amusement that has the quality of being directed inward at himself as much as outward.