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Someone left a decanter of whisky in the middle of the long table with six glasses around it.

That doesn’t feel encouraging.

I stand at the window with one shoulder braced against the frame, staring out at the black line of the sea beyond the cliffs. From this side of Connemara, on a clear enough evening, the world looks all stone and wind and water. It should have steadied me.

It doesn’t.

It only serves to call home to mind. Ireland being taken apart piece by piece while men call it just and demand thanks for the butchery. And beneath that, sharper still, is the old sick thought I should be elsewhere, doing more, fighting harder.

Damn all the promises I made to Thomas. Damn them, and damn the gods I laid those vows before.

Mannie says he’s found something. Nothing more than that. Still, the weight in his voice sends me ahead of him with the promise that he’ll bring the others to me.

So I wait with my heart somewhere near the pit of my stomach.

The door opens behind me.

I turn as James steps in, Ellen half a step behind him, both of them looking a touch too composed to be truly composed. James’s hair is out at the crown, and Ellen’s skin is pinker than normal. James notices me noticing and straightens like a lad hauled before a schoolmaster.

That nearly does me in.

“Gods,” I say, pushing off the window. “Couldn’t even give you a proper moment to make yourselves presentable.”

Ellen flushes deeper. James drags a hand through his hair and mutters, “Oh, to hell wi’ ye. I’m a married man.”

“Aye,” I say, crossing toward the table, “and plainly determined to prove it to everyone.”

Ellen lifts her chin, fighting a smile. “We cannae look that disordered.”

I look at James. Then Ellen. Then James again, slow enough to be offensive.

“No,” I say, granting her all the false reassurance I can manage. “You both always look thoroughly got at.”

James mutters something dark under his breath and drops into a chair with a scrape of wood against the floor. Ellen presses her lips together, loses the battle, and lets out a breath that is half a laugh. She comes to stand behind him and places a hand on his shoulder, which he grabs immediately.

The door opens again, and Alex walks in with Róisín beside him.

This time, I do laugh.

Alex looks like a man interrupted mid-contentment and deeply aggrieved by it. Róisín’s hair is pinned up, though damp at her neck and temples, and both of them carry a gleam no one brings into a room on a cold northern night unless they’ve come from hot water.

James looks at Alex. Alex looks back.

A long, appalled understanding passes between them.

Then both men say, in perfect unison, “I’m gonna kill Mannie.”

Róisín lets out a startled laugh. Ellen drops her forehead briefly against James’s shoulder, as though that statement somehow makes the embarrassment worse.

I lean one hip against the table and look them over, making enough of a show of it to be annoying. James and Ellen glow with the new, helpless sort of happiness that makes me want to shake them and guard them in equal measure.

But it’s Alex and Róisín I linger on.

I fold my arms. “Took you long enough.”

Alex grins, shameless as ever. “Some things are worth the wait.”

Róisín pokes him in the ribs. “Oh, Gods, would you stop?”