Page 17 of Irish Oath
"Who else knows?" I asked.
"That you're alive? The three of us. No one."
"You haven't told your family?"
"No."
"Why not?"
His mouth tightened. "Because until I know who actually took out your family, I don't know who I can trust. My own included." He held my gaze. "Whoever did this went to a great deal of trouble to make it look like us. That kind of trouble takes either a serious grudge against the Kerrigans or access to how we operate. Maybe both."
I turned that over. The logic held. A frame this careful meant someone who wanted the Kerrigans to wear it, and knew them well enough to make it fit.
"Someone framed you," I said.
"Yes."
"You have proof of that."
"We have proof the evidence against us is manufactured," Cormac said. First time he'd spoken since sitting down, and his voice was exactly what I expected. Flat, precise, every word doing its job and not one more. "Which isn't the same thing. We don't know who did it or why. We know we didn't, and we know someone wanted it to look like we did."
"How long have you known?" I asked him.
"Three years. We found an anomaly in the forensic record from the night of the attack. A detail that was altered. Someone with access to the investigation changed a piece of evidence after the fact." He reached into his jacket, pulled out a folded document, and set it on the bar. "Original record and the altered version, side by side. The change is subtle. It's there."
I didn't touch it yet.
"Why didn't you find this sooner?" I asked.
"We weren't looking for it," Ronan said. "We were looking for who did it. Not for proof the evidence itself had been tampered with." Something tightened in his jaw. "We should have been. We weren't."
I studied his face. He wasn't performing. The tightness, the flat way he said we should have been, that was a man handing down a verdict on himself he'd handed down many times and never once made peace with.
I picked up the document. Read it. Read it again. Set it down and felt the last of something loosen and let go. It wasn't dramatic. It didn't feel like a revelation. It felt like setting down aweight I'd carried so long I'd stopped noticing it, and finding my hands emptier than I'd braced for.
Then I said it plainly, because they'd crossed an ocean to argue me out of a thing I'd mostly argued myself out of already.
"You're pushing on an open door. I stopped believing it was you about eighteen months ago. The frame was too clean. Too pointed. Built to be found. I kept the file open on you out of discipline, not conviction."
Something moved through the three of them that I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did. Ronan went very still, the particular stillness of a man who'd braced his whole body to lift a weight and reached down to find it already gone. Cormac's attention came up off the bar and onto my face, full for the first time all afternoon, recalculating. I watched the shape of the conversation he'd prepared for come apart in his hands.
"You got there on your own," Cormac said. Not quite a question.
"From the wrong side of the same evidence. I didn't have your alibi. I had a frame working too hard to be true." I put it to him straight. "It was enough to move you off the board. Never enough to tell me who belonged on it instead. That's the only reason I'm still in this room. You can't tell me either, and I'm tired of not knowing."
"No," Ronan said. "But put what you have beside what we have, and we might."
"Play the recordings," I said.
Ronan reached for the phone.
"Not the one from before," I said. "A different one. One I haven't heard."
He held my eyes a moment, scrolling, then pressed play and set the phone between us.
His father's voice first. Then my father's. Then my mother.
I was ready for my father. I'd heard him twice now in twelve hours and built a rough, useless system for managing it. I was not ready for my mother.
