Page 90 of The Dangerous Dance

"Good. Get dressed. Nothing operational." She looks at my overnight bag with the assessing eye of someone who has opinions about its contents. "Something comfortable. Do you have something comfortable."

"I have clothes."

"Comfortable ones."

"Mackenzie." I sit up. "What are you doing."

"Planning your Saturday," she says, with the breezy authority of someone who has decided that planning someone else's Saturday is entirely within her remit. "You look like you slept but not enough and like you're already thinking about three things you're not supposed to be thinking about on a Saturday." She meets my eyes. "I'm taking that away from you for a few hours."

I look at her.

"Ailish is coming at ten," she says. "We're going to be in the main sitting room and we're going to do nothing operationally useful and if you try to bring a file in I'll confiscate it."

"I don't have files."

"You have the burner."

"The burner stays in my pocket."

"Then it stays in your pocket on silent." She pushes off the doorframe. "Ten minutes. Comfortable clothes."

She goes.

I sit on the edge of the bed and look at my bag and think about the last time someone planned my Saturday, which was never, because my Saturdays have been operationally structured since I was approximately fourteen years old.

I find the least operational thing in my bag, which is a soft grey sweater I brought because the safehouse gets cold in the evening, and I put it on, and I go downstairs.

Ailish arrives at ten past ten with the specific efficiency of someone who has coordinated timing and is mildly disappointed it isn't exact. She comes into the main sitting room carrying a bag that produces, in sequence: three kinds of tea, a box of something from a bakery that smells like cardamom and butter, two film magazines that she hands to Mackenzie without explanation, and a small jar of something she sets on the side table.

She looks at me. "You look better than yesterday."

"Yesterday I arrived," I say. "I didn't look like anything."

"You looked like someone who'd been carrying something heavy for a while." She sits in the chair by the window with the ease of someone for whom this chair is a known quantity. "The sweater's an improvement."

Mackenzie is already on the floor with the film magazines, which appears to be her natural state in a sitting room. "She owns one comfortable thing," she tells Ailish.

"I own multiple⁠—"

"One that she brought," Mackenzie clarifies.

Ailish looks at me with something that is not quite sympathy and is adjacent to it. "We'll address that eventually," she says. "Not today."

Tea is made. The bakery box opens to reveal something that has cardamom and pears and a layer of something sticky on top that I identify as honey and which is extraordinary.

"What is this," I say.

"A thing I found," Ailish says. "There's a place on the west side. A Hungarian woman makes them on weekends." She drinks her tea. "I've been going there for two years and I've never learned her name."

"She won't tell you," Mackenzie says, not looking up from a magazine. "Ailish has tried. She just hands over the box and takes the money."

"I respect the boundary," Ailish says.

I eat the cardamom thing and look at the two of them — Ailish in the window chair with her tea, Mackenzie on the floor with the magazines, the room doing its Saturday morning thing, and I think about the specific strangeness of being here, in this room, with these people, who have no operational reason to be sharing a Saturday morning with me and are doing it anyway.

"You're thinking again," Mackenzie says.

"I'm allowed to think."