Tiernan
I'd been cooking since four o'clock, which anybody who knows me would've clocked as a bad sign, and Cormac, who knows me better than most, hadn't said a word about it yet. That was him being kind. He'd get there.
Here's the thing about me. I'm not the cook.
We don't have one, God help us, which is its own small tragedy.
My job's the other rooms, the talking ones.
Reading a face across a table. Knowing which man in the deal is lying and which one just wishes he were somewhere else.
Closing the thing because everybody in the room decided, somewhere between the handshake and the whiskey, that they liked me.
That's the gig, I'm good at it, and I'll tell you for free it's a hell of a lot easier than a béarnaise.
But when something sits too big in my chest to charm my way around, I cook.
Cooking makes you hold six things at once, the heat and the timing and the order, all of it landing on the same second or the whole thing's ruined.
And for as long as that takes, there's no room left in my head for anything else.
Tonight I had a great deal I didn't want to leave room for.
Sienna Madigan was upstairs.
I'd checked. Four times, maybe five, not that I was counting, and not in any way she could've caught me at.
Didn't knock. Didn't hover in the hall like some sad bastard outside a door.
I was just aware of her, the way you're aware of a fire in the room.
You don't stare at it. You just always know exactly where it is, and precisely how much of the house it'd take if it ever decided to.
Her light had been on since she went up.
She hadn't come down.
"You're going to reduce that too far," Cormac said from the doorway.
I checked the pan. Course he was right. Bastard's always right. I turned the heat down.
"She'll come down when she's ready," he said. He came in and leaned against the counter, arms crossed, in the posture that means he's done being wherever he was and has decided the kitchen is the better option. For Cormac, that's practically throwing his arms open. "Stop hovering."
"I'm cooking."
"You're hovering while cooking." He nodded at the stove. "What is that?"
"Lamb stew. Brown bread in the oven. Roast veg. Apple tart after."
He went quiet a beat. "You made her mother's recipe."
I kept my eyes on the pan. "Ronan mentioned once her mother used to make it. For the important occasions." I shrugged. "Figured tonight qualified."
Cormac said nothing, which is Cormac for a lot of things. This time it was the good kind. He understood the thing I'd done that I wasn't going to explain, and he didn't make me explain it. Weighed it against whatever he weighs things against and let it lie.
"Ronan's been in his study since she got here," I said.
"I know."
"He should be in here."
"He'll come when he's ready too," Cormac said. "Same as her."
I glanced at the doorway. The house had the quiet it gets on the evenings when something big is happening and nobody's saying it out loud. Silence doing a full day's work.
"You think she'll stay," I said.
Cormac gave it the seriousness he gives everything, which is all of it. "Tonight?"
"Past tonight."
Another pause. "I think she'll stay as long as it takes to get what she came for. Whether it turns into anything else depends on things neither of us gets a vote on."
"Deeply useful, thanks. Really. Love that for me."
The corner of his mouth moved. On Cormac, that's a standing ovation.
Then, footsteps on the stairs.
Not Ronan. Ronan's footsteps have a weight and a pattern I've been able to pick out since we were boys. These were lighter. More deliberate. The footsteps of somebody who'd decided to come down and was committing to it one step at a time.
Sienna appeared in the doorway.
She'd changed out of the clothes she arrived in.
Dark trousers, a simple top, her hair loose around her shoulders for the first time since I'd known her, which was, I was very aware, a little over a week, though it had the weight of longer.
She was still guarded, still carrying that held-together quality into every room, but a shade less armored than she'd been at the front door. A shade. I'd take a shade.
She took in the stove. Then me. Then Cormac.
"It smells like something my mother used to make," she said.
Careful. Not an accusation. Just laying it on the table to see what I'd do with it.
"Lamb stew," I said. "Old Dunraven recipe. Half the mothers around here made a version of it." Which was true, and also not the whole truth, and she knew it, and I knew she knew it, and neither of us said so. That's a kind of conversation too.
She held my eyes a moment, those green eyes that gave back about as much as a locked door, then nodded once and came into the kitchen.
"Can I do something?"
"Table needs setting," Cormac said, before I could tell her she didn't have to lift a finger. He nodded at the cutlery drawer. "Four places."
She found the drawer without being shown. Then the plates. Then the glasses. I watched her move through my kitchen finding my things like she'd lived in it a year, no wasted motion, reading the logic of a room she'd never stood in and bending to it on the spot.
She'd been doing that her whole life. I tried not to think too hard about what it costs a person to get that good at it.
"Where's Ronan?" she asked. Not anxious. Just taking inventory of the room.
"Coming," I said.
Right on cue his footsteps came down the corridor, that weight and pattern, and then he was in the doorway.
He took in Sienna setting his table, and for half a second his face did a thing it doesn't do for anybody, so fast I'd have missed it if I hadn't spent my whole life watching for exactly that.
A man seeing a thing he'd pictured for years finally standing in the actual world.
He cleared his throat. "Smells good."
"Tiernan's been cooking since four," Cormac said.
"It didn't take that long."
"It took that long," Cormac said.
Sienna glanced between us and said nothing, but something flickered, and I decided to count it as a win.
"Wine?" I asked.
"Water's fine."
I got water for everyone, and we sat down.
The four of us around the kitchen table in the Kerrigan estate on a Wednesday in October, sea somewhere out the black windows, fire going in the corner, lamb stew steaming in the middle of it all, and nobody said a word right away.
Not awkward. It wasn't awkward. It was four people who each had a great deal to say, choosing the order to say it in.
Sienna looked at the food.
"My mother used to say a good meal was the only honest conversation," she said.
Not to anyone. Just out loud, the way you say a thing you've carried too long and need to set down somewhere with witnesses.
"That you could lie with words but you couldn't lie with food.
Either you fed people well or you didn't."
She picked up her spoon. Tried it.
"This is good," she said. Flat voice, but the flat was doing a lot of lifting. She went back in for a second spoonful before she’d finished saying it, which told me more than the words did. "This is very good."
"Careful," I said. "I'll get ideas."
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Nearly. "Don't."
Ronan made a sound that might've been the front end of a laugh and thought better of it. Cormac reached for the bread.
We got on with it, the talk coming in pieces, unforced, the natural build of four people sharing a table and finding each other's edges.
I asked her about the bar and she answered straight, no dodge, which I clocked as a good sign.
Ronan talked about the town, which buildings had changed and which hadn't, how Dunraven had gone quiet as the young ones left for the cities.
She asked questions, and they were the good kind, the ones that show you what a person actually thinks instead of what they'd like you thinking they think.
"The families that carved up my father's coast after," she said, spoon pausing. "Any of them still around?"
"Two," Ronan said. "One folded on its own. One got absorbed."
"By?"
"Us." He didn't dress it up. Ronan never does.
She nodded slow and went back to her stew, and I watched her put that away somewhere with the rest.
At some point the stew was gone and the bread with it, and I got up and brought the apple tart to the table.
Sienna went still when she saw it.
"My mother made this too," she said, quiet.
"Half the mothers around here," I said, and let her have the lie for the second time.
She looked up at me. Steady. Seeing all of it, the lie and the reason for it both.
"Thank you," she said. Just that. Two words carrying about forty pounds, and I wasn't going to make her set it down and count it out.
"Don't thank me yet," I said. "Wait till you've had it. Could be a disaster. I peaked at the stew."
She tried it.
She didn't say anything. She just closed her eyes for one second, one involuntary, unguarded second, and then opened them and went back to being Sienna Madigan, who shows nothing and gives nothing away.
But I saw it. God help me, I collect them, these seconds she doesn't mean to hand out.
That part of me had been filling up since a Chicago bar a little over a week ago and showed no sign of knowing when to quit.
I didn't say a word about it. Didn't make it a thing.
A man's got to have some restraint, even when it's killing him.
After dinner she cleared without being asked and washed her own plate.
Ronan watched her do it with the look he'd worn all night, that barely-held thing, and then said goodnight and went back to his study, because Ronan processes by working and tonight there was a lot to work.
Cormac nodded at her once and vanished off toward wherever it is Cormac goes, which I've failed to map in twenty years of trying.
Which left me and Sienna in the kitchen.
She dried her hands on the towel and looked out at the dark garden, and I leaned on the counter and looked at her, and for a while neither of us bothered with words.
"It's strange," she said. "Being here."
"I'd imagine."
"Not a bad strange." A pause. "Just strange." She looked down at the towel. "I keep waiting for it to feel wrong. Being in their house. Eating their food." She set the towel down. "It doesn't feel wrong."
"Good," I said.
She glanced over. "Don't make too much of that."
"I'm not making anything of it," I said. "I'm just glad. Selfishly, mostly. I did cook since four."
The look she gave me then had something in it that wasn't quite a smile but paid rent in the same building. She nodded once, some private thing decided, said goodnight, and left the kitchen.
I listened to her footsteps on the stairs. I listened to her door close.
I stood in the kitchen that smelled of lamb stew and apple tart and her mother's recipes, looking out at the dark Dunraven garden, and I thought about a fifteen-year-old girl running through the night away from this town, and a thirty-year-old woman walking back into it, and how much has to happen to a person in the space between those two.
I thought about her eyes closing for that one second over the apple tart.
Then I turned off the kitchen light and went to find Ronan.
He needed to hear about that second.