Page 34 of Irish Oath
"He's insufferable this morning," Tiernan said, banging in from the cold with a bag of something from the village and his hair doing what it did. "You know that? He fixed a cellar hatch and now he's walking around like a man who invented the cellar hatch. What did you do to him."
"I found it first."
Tiernan stopped with the bag half-unpacked. "You did not."
"Hinge was rusted. Nobody'd checked it since the last century."
He put a hand to his chest like I'd wounded him. "Fourteen years that man's kept this house and you've beaten him at it in four days. I'm going to enjoy this for the rest of my natural life. Tea?"
"I'll make it."
"You will not, you're a guest."
"I've made ten thousand drinks for strangers. Sit down before you hurt yourself."
He sat down. He did it grinning, and he watched me move around his kitchen finding his things the way I found the drawer at that first dinner, no wasted motion, and he propped his chin on his hand and enjoyed it openly, which was the thing about Tiernan. He never made me guess. Ronan hid everything and Cormac buried it and Tiernan just set it right out on the table between you where you could see it, and somehow that was harder to defend against than either of the others.
"Go on then," he said. "Tell me how you did it. I want details. I want to watch him die a little when I bring it up at dinner."
So I told him. And somewhere in the telling he said something about Cormac's face when he found the rust, did an impression of it that was ninety percent stillness and ten percent a single raised eyebrow, and it was so exactly right that a laugh got out of me before I could stop it. A real one. It surprised us both. It came up out of somewhere I kept locked, quick and startled, and Tiernan's grin changed when he heard it, went from playing to something quieter, like he'd caught a coin he hadn't known was in the air.
"There it is," he said, soft.
"Don't."
"Wouldn't dream of it." He got up to put the kettle on after all, letting me off the hook, which he did more than a man like him got credit for. "You've a good laugh. That's all I'm saying. Be a shame to keep it in a drawer."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I drank the tea he made me and didn't leave when I could have, and marked that too.
Ronan I saved for last.Not that I'd have admitted the order meant anything. It did.
He was in the study after dark with the case spread out the way it lived now, mine and theirs grown into one animal. I brought him the thing I'd worked out that afternoon, a gap in the money's timeline, and I stood at his shoulder to point it out on the page, and that was the mistake, because standing at his shoulder put me close.
I hadn't planned on close. Close was where my whole system stopped cataloguing the room and started only knowing where he was in it. He went still the way he did, that big careful stillness, and the warmth came off him, and I was aware, in a way I had spent a very long time not being aware of anyone, of the space between my arm and his and how little of it there was.
He turned his head. Not far. Just enough that if either of us moved wrong it would stop being an accident.
Neither of us moved.
"That's good work," he said. Low. His eyes stayed on the page like the page was safer. "The gap. I missed it."
"You weren't looking for it in the right decade."
"No." A breath. "I wasn't."
I could have stayed there. That was the thing I marked, standing in a dead family's study with a living man's shoulder half an inch from mine. I wanted to stay there. The wanting was quiet and enormous and completely unauthorized, and I'd have let it walk me one step closer if I'd let it do anything at all.
I stepped back instead.
"Late," I said. "I'll leave you to it."
He let me go. He always let me go, which was somehow the whole problem. "Goodnight, Sienna."
He said my name like it still cost him something to spend. I took it up the stairs with me like a stone in a pocket, warm from being carried.
In my roomI stood at the window and looked at the black water and did the accounting I do at the end of every day, the tally of who I'd let close and how close and what it might cost me.
And I noticed the thing.
