Page 57 of The Dangerous Dance

"How's it going," he says.

"Brennan's March gap," Mackenzie tells him. "Nadia found it."

"What does it tell us."

"That Connolly had at least one other source in the west corridor." I hold his gaze steadily. "I'm working through who."

He looks at me for a moment. "Good," he says, and then he looks at his sister and says something about the Friday timeline and she responds and they talk for approximately ninety seconds about logistics, and then he looks at me once more with that same expression, and then he goes.

I look at my screen.

"You know," Mackenzie says, "for someone trained to be invisible, you're quite visible about this particular thing."

"Mackenzie."

"I'm just saying."

"Could you say it less."

"Probably not." She taps something on her keyboard. "He's noticed, by the way."

I look up. "Noticed what."

"The face. The controlled one." She meets my eyes. "He mentioned it to me. In that way he has of mentioning things that he's actually asking about but won't ask about directly."

"What did you tell him."

"I told him to ask you." She turns back to her screen. "Which he won't do directly either. So you're both going to continue performing elaborate unawareness of something both of you are completely aware of until one of you stops."

I look at the Brennan file.

"He's going to say something," she says. "Probably soon. Probably in that way where it sounds like he's talking about something else." She pauses. "I'd prepare for that if I were you."

"I'm always prepared," I say.

"For operational things," she says. "This isn't operational."

He says something at three in the afternoon.

He comes back to the office ostensibly to collect the Connolly file, which he could have sent Conor for, and he collects it and then he leans against the doorframe while Mackenzie is on a call in the hallway and looks at me with the expression I've been cataloguing.

"Roise and I," he says. "You know that's not⁠—"

"I know," I say. "You told me."

"I want to make sure you know."

"You've made it clear."

"Have I." There is something in his voice that is not quite amusement and not quite seriousness. "Because you've been reading the same paragraph since half ten and Brennan's March gap doesn't require three hours to process."

I look at him.

He looks at me.

"Say whatever you're going to say," I tell him.

"I'm not going to say anything." He pushes off the doorframe. "I'm just going to point out that you've been doing the face for four hours and Mackenzie has noticed and Roise has noticed and if Conor notices we'll never hear the end of it."