Page 40 of Irish Oath
We walked back inside, out of the cold.
At the foot of the stairs I looked at her, the sea still loud behind the door we'd shut on it, and I thought about every version of this moment I'd imagined over the years, and how none of them looked like this, and how this was better than all of them.
"Goodnight," I said.
I didn't say her name. I'd wanted to the whole time we were out there. It had been lingering behind my teeth since Chicago, the name I'd carried for her longer than she knew. But it was the one thing in this house that was only hers, and I didn't trust what saying it out loud would do, to her or to me, so I held it where I'd been holding it.
16
TIERNAN
The tea had gone cold in the pot by the time I heard her on the stairs.
Half two in the morning. I was still up in the snug off the hall, sitting in the last of the heat from the fire Cormac had banked down before he vanished to wherever he vanishes. I'd come back down after Ronan. After he told me, in about nine words, about her forehead on his shoulder and her fist in his sleeve and his hand laid over hers. I'd made a pot I didn't want, because tea is what my hands do when the rest of me has things to sit with and the sitting isn't going well.
The footsteps stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
She was deciding whether to come in. I let her decide.
She came in.
She was in what she slept in, a soft shirt and loose trousers, hair down, bare feet on the cold flagstones. She'd expected an empty room. I watched her clock the change and adjust to it without a word, which was its own small marvel, a person recalibrating that fast at half two in the morning.
"Sorry," she said. "I thought everyone was asleep."
"Don't apologize. Sit down."
She considered the empty chair across from mine, then took it.
I got up, fetched her a mug, poured without asking, and set it in front of her. The snug was warm. The fire ticked. Outside, the Dunraven night carried on without us, the way it had on every bad night I'd sat up in this room.
"Ronan came up to see you," I said. Not a question.
"He told you."
"He tells me things. Not everything. Just the things he can't carry on his own." I turned my mug on the table. "He's carried a lot on his own for a long time."
She wrapped both hands around her mug the way people do when they want the warmth more than the tea.
"He sat with me. Didn't try to fix it. Barely said a word." A pause. "I let him. I'm not sure what that means."
"It means you're starting to let yourself remember who you are."
That earned me something. Not the almost-smile she handed out like a coin she didn't want to spend. Warmer than that.
"You knew who I was the second you walked into the bar," she said.
"Yes."
"You sat there an hour, drank my father's whiskey, and talked to me like a stranger."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
I had answers. Practical ones. The whole logical case for why you don't walk up to a woman who spent years building a file on your family and announce yourself into it. All true. None of it the real reason.
"Because for an hour you were just a woman in her bar who knew her whiskey and made jokes about hardware stores, and treated me like a person instead of a variable in the worstproblem of her life." I shrugged. "I didn't want to be the one who took that off you the second I sat down."
