Page 88 of The Dangerous Dance

I look at the window. At the dark of the courtyard that we can see from here, the same courtyard where this morning happened. "And now," I say. "You think you understand the difference."

"I think I'm trying to practice it," he says. "Which is not the same as understanding it but is the only way to get there."

I'm quiet for a moment. "You left the window unlatched," I say. "In the safehouse."

"Yes."

"The first time. Before you even—" I pause. "You left it unlatched."

"Yes."

"Why."

He is quiet for a moment. "Because I wanted you to stay because you chose to," he says. "Not because you couldn't leave." A pause. "And because I wasn't ready to be the other kind of person again."

I sit with this for a long time.

The room is quiet. The compound is quiet. Outside the window the courtyard is dark and the city is doing its city thing beyond the walls and he is warm and his heartbeat is even and I am sitting in the home of the head of the Irish family with a burner phone in my pocket and a Russian handler I'm managing from a distance and approximately forty percent of my operational situation unresolved.

"Liam," I say.

"Mm."

"I'm not going to tell you I love you tonight."

A pause. "All right."

"Not because it isn't—" I stop. "Not because I don't know what I'm — I just need it to be said when it doesn't feel like a response to something. When it's just — its own thing."

"I understand that," he says.

"Do you."

"Yes." His arm tightens fractionally around my shoulders. "I can wait."

"It might not be long," I say.

"I know," he says, and there's something in his voice that is not amusement and is thoroughly warm. "I know it might not be long."

I look at the ceiling.

"I slapped you," I say.

"You did."

"You deserved it."

"The jury's out."

"You said you were in love with me with your whole family in the house."

"In a house full of family," he says. "Which was the point."

I think about what that distinction means. About being in a house full of family. About Gianna with her wooden spoon and Mackenzie's look at the door and Declan's twice in one evening and Ailish's specific expression and Finn watching across the table.

"It's different," I agree.

He doesn't respond. His breathing has changed — slower, more even, the specific rhythm of someone going under. He has been awake since before dawn and he fought his brother this morning and ran an evening of complicated family dinner and is now, at the end of all of it, doing what bodies do when they've been kept at altitude all day and are finally allowed to descend.