Page 93 of The Dangerous Dance

He looks at me specifically.

I look back.

"There's food," Mackenzie says, without looking up from her magazine.

"I see that."

"Gianna brought it."

"I gathered." He looks at his sister. "How are you."

"Better than you," she says cheerfully. "Your face is still⁠—"

"Thank you, Kenzie."

"I'm just saying."

He comes into the room and sits on the arm of the couch in the way of someone who is visiting rather than staying, the particular posture of a man who isn't sure if he's welcome in a configuration that assembled without him and is reading the room before committing.

Gianna hands him the bread.

He takes it.

He is welcome.

He looks at me again across the room and I look at him and neither of us says anything and neither of us needs to, which is a specific development from two months ago when every exchange between us required architecture and strategy and the careful management of what was actually being communicated underneath what was being said.

"Viktor?" he says, quietly, just to me.

"Another week," I say. "We're clear until Friday. After that the capsule story stops holding."

He nods. He doesn't ask me to explain the capsule story. He has read it the same way I have.

He eats his bread.

The room continues being what it's been all morning, which is full and warm and entirely unremarkable in the specific way of things that are not unremarkable at all but have arrived at something that resembles peace, which is — in the life I've been living — a more radical thing than anything I was sent here to do.

Ailish catches my eye from the window chair.

She raises her tea cup, just slightly, in the smallest possible gesture.

I raise mine back.

Outside, the afternoon does what afternoons do.

Inside, nobody runs anything.

It is, I think, the best Saturday I've had in years.

Possibly ever.

CHAPTER 27

Liam

The photos arrive on a Monday.

Conor brings them to my desk at half past eight in the morning without preamble, which is his method when the thing he's bringing requires the conversation to happen before the context, not after. He sets a tablet on the desk and steps back and stands with the particular stillness of someone who has been processing something for long enough to have arrived at controlled and is waiting for me to catch up.