Page 11 of Irish Oath
RONAN
I didn't remember the flight.
I'd been crossing that water since I was old enough to be useful to my father, and there was always something to remember. The light at thirty thousand feet. A bad seat. The engines going to white noise. This time, nothing. Eight hours in the dark with my hands on my knees and my eyes open and one thought going around.
She's alive.
She's alive.
She's alive.
Which meant the grief I'd carried all this time was the wrong weight, and the right one was asleep in Chicago, not knowing I was already crossing an ocean toward her. I didn't let it be joy. I've never trusted myself with joy. It's a thing that costs a man later, and I've paid enough of the later to know. I let it be what it was. A debt I hadn't known was still open. Mine to pay, the way everything in that family became mine to pay.
I'd grieved her. That was the part I kept catching on, in the dark over the ocean. Not a woman. I'd never met the woman. I'd grieved a possibility, a girl I'd been told about before I understood what a marriage between two houses was for, andthen told about again, differently, the autumn everything at Dunraven burned. A Madigan daughter, gone with the rest. I'd carried her the specific way a man carries a person he never got to lose, which is worse than the ordinary way, because there's no memory to wear smooth over time. Only the shape of the hole where she should have been.
There was a grave. Not hers. There couldn't be hers, they never found enough of any of them to bury, but the parish put a stone up for the Madigans on the hill above the harbor, one stone for a whole family, and I'd gone to it more than I ever told anyone. Not out of a grief I could have named. Out of a debt I couldn't. I'd stand at a stone with no one under it and feel like the last man still keeping an appointment the rest of the world had let lapse. I never understood why I went. I understood it now, with my hands flat on my knees and the engines gone to nothing. Some part of me had never once believed she was in that ground. Some part of me had been standing at that stone all those years, waiting to be proven wrong.
O'Hare in the early morning had its own chaos. Loud, purposeful, indifferent to anyone not trying to be part of it. I moved through it the way I move through any space that isn't mine, fast and without pulling eyes, and found Cormac and Tiernan at the arrivals doors with the look of two men who hadn't slept and weren't going to mention it.
Something eased in Tiernan's face when he saw me. Relief, near enough.
Cormac didn't bother with his. "Car's outside. We talk before we do anything else."
That was Cormac. No greeting, no run-up, straight to the part that mattered. I'd known him since we were boys running the same Dunraven streets, and in all that time he'd never once opened his mouth with anything that wasn't the most important thing in it.
"Agreed."
The car was a black SUV. Anonymous. The kind that exists in every city on earth for moving people who need to talk without witnesses. I took the back. Tiernan slid in beside me. Cormac took the front and turned sideways so he could see us both, the way he sits when he has things to say and wants to watch us hear them.
The driver pulled into the airport traffic.
"She's still there," Cormac said. "Bar opens at four. She'll be in before that to prep."
"And last night?"
"She stayed." He let that be the whole of it. "Didn't run, didn't pack. Whatever she's decided, she decided it lying down, not out a back window."
"She knows," I said. Not a question.
"She knows. I'd stake anything on it."
I looked out at the highway running away behind the glass, flat and gray and nothing like home. She knew she'd been found and stayed anyway. I'd been turning it over since Tiernan first called and still didn't have the whole of it. It could mean she'd decided to stop running. It could mean a trap. It could mean she was just tired, and made the choice tired people make, to let the thing come rather than spend one more day out ahead of it.
I understood that choice better than I wanted to.
"You sat across from her," I said to Tiernan. "Before she knew. What did you see."
He took a second with it. "A person. Just herself, whatever that looks like after a life like hers. She poured like she was born doing it. And when I put my grandfather's name on the Madigans and said they were all gone now, I watched for the flinch." He turned toward his window. "There wasn't one. She said she'd heard the same, in a voice with nothing in it at all. She's carrying the whole thing very quietly."
Cormac picked it up. "She's been at this longer than the bar's been open. Four years for the place. The watching is older." He looked at me, level. "And I worked out how she's had eyes on us. It's the whiskey, Ronan. Getting Madigan and Sons into the right rooms, into our supply, into our events. She's been inside our house for years and not one of us felt the draft."
The whiskey.
I thought about every bottle of Madigan and Sons ever opened at the estate. Every gathering. Every quiet night in the study with a glass of something worth drinking. My father pouring it for her father in the old recordings, the ones I'd listened to enough times to say along with.
She'd been there. In every glass, in every room, the whole time.
"She thinks we did it," I said.
