Page 58 of The Dangerous Dance

"I don't have a face."

"You have a very specific face." He crosses to my end of the table and picks up a file that is beside my screen, which is not the Connolly file but which gives him a reason to be at this end of the table. He is very close. "It looks like this." He adopts an expression of elaborate, almost aggressive composure. "Nothing to see here. I'm fine. Everything is fine. The paragraph is extremely interesting."

I stare at him.

"That's not⁠—"

"It's very accurate." He sets the file down. "I find it interesting," he says, quietly, in the register that isn't for the room but just for where we're standing. "For the record."

"What."

"That you make it." He meets my eyes. "Because you don't have to."

I look at him. At the tired eyes and the careful face and the man who is standing at my end of the table to tell me that I don't have to manage what I feel in this room, which is something his sister told me once in a smaller kitchen, and which apparently runs in the family.

"Liam," I say.

"Mm."

"Go deal with Declan."

Something moves through his expression. "Friday."

"I know it's Friday. I'm telling you that between now and Friday, if you're going to stand in doorways and make observations about my face, I'm going to have significantly less patience for it than I currently do."

"Your current patience is quite thin."

"Yes."

"Noted." He picks up the Connolly file — the actual one, which is at the other end of the table and which he has therefore moved the entire length of the room to collect when he could have taken it immediately. He is almost at the door when he says, without turning around: "Tomorrow morning. The west corridor. I want you in on the briefing."

"All right."

"Bring the March gap analysis."

"Obviously."

He goes.

Mackenzie comes back from the hallway with her phone in hand and the expression of someone who heard the last thirty seconds of a conversation through a door and has opinions about it. "Well," she says.

"Don't," I say.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were going to say several things."

"Only one thing." She sits. "He hasn't brought anyone into a west corridor briefing who wasn't inner circle in four years."

I look at the Brennan tab.

"That's all," she says. "That's the one thing."

I look at the Brennan tab for a while longer.

The cracks, I think, are showing. My father would say that's weakness. I'm beginning to think it might be something else — the beginning of a different kind of structure, one where the gaps aren't failures of the wall but places where something can actually get through.

Whether that's wisdom or sentiment, I haven't decided.