Page 6 of Irish Oath
"Tiernan."
"Yeah?"
I looked at the bottle on the shelf behind my desk. My father's bottle, standing in that room as long as I could remember. "You said she's alright."
The real question was too big for a phone, so that was as near as I got to it.
His voice dropped. "She's more than alright. She built something, Ronan. It's hers, all of it. You see it the second you walk in. She's not hiding in a hole somewhere. She's surviving, and she's doing it well."
Something moved through my chest. I didn't go looking for a name for it.
"I'll see you tomorrow," I said, and hung up.
I stood in the middle of the study and looked at the file I hadn't read, then the bottle, then the dark past the window.
She'd been alive the whole time. I hadn't known. Someone had made sure I hadn't known.
That someone was still breathing somewhere. When I found them, I was going to take their world apart the way they took hers.
But that was tomorrow's work, and the day after, and however many days it took.
Tonight I opened the thread with my estate manager and typed three words.
Car at six.
Then I sat back down and read every word of the file I'd been failing to read, because sleep could wait.
It had waited this long already.
4
SIENNA
I lived above the bar.
It started as a practical decision. Cheaper than a separate place, no commute, sensible for the hours I kept. Four years in, it was still practical, and also something else I didn't poke at too hard. Sleeping above the thing I'd built made the nights easier. Like keeping a hand on the wall in the dark.
The apartment was small and clean and had exactly what it needed and nothing it didn't. A bed. A kitchen I used for coffee and little else. A desk by the window where I kept my files. Not the bar receipts and the liquor invoices, those lived in the office downstairs. These were the other files. The ones I'd been building since I was fifteen. Photographs, documents, hand-drawn maps, and a timeline that ran the whole length of one wall. I'd taken it down and put it back up in so many shapes that the plaster underneath showed the ghost of every version before this one.
I sat at the desk and did not look at the timeline.
I watched the street instead, quiet now, the odd car sliding through the wet dark. I had a glass of water I didn't drink and closing notes I didn't read and the low itch of a person who's tired and can't sleep and knows better than to fight it.
The man from the bar wouldn't get out of my head.
That happened sometimes. Some people had a quality my brain wouldn't put down. Something unresolved that snagged. Usually I could find the source in a minute or two. A familiar mannerism. A resemblance. A turn of phrase that echoed some old conversation.
This was different. This was something my brain kept working around instead of toward. A word on the tip of the tongue that vanished every time I reached for it. He'd said Dunraven and I marked it. Irish, west coast, possible family connection, low alarm. Then he ordered the Madigan twelve without a glance at the menu, and something at the back of my skull went very quiet in a way I couldn't account for.
And his eyes. Blue. The kind that goes almost gray in some light. The kind you don't see often, specific to a handful of families on the western Irish coast the way the green was specific to mine.
I picked up the water and set it down again without drinking.
Dunraven.
I went to the kitchen and stood in front of the open fridge wanting nothing in it, then shut it and came back to the desk. I pulled the bottom drawer. Under the false bottom I'd built the first week I moved in sat a smaller file than the one on the wall. This one I kept apart. This one was personal in a way the others weren't.
Photographs.
