Ronan #2
"No. But it happened, and you've been alone because of it, and I'm sorry for that." A pause. "I should have found you sooner. I should have kept looking when the trail went cold instead of telling myself it was closed."
"You couldn't have found me," she said. "I was very careful."
"You were a ghost," I said. "You weren't found by luck. Tiernan ran your family's name down for years. Every bottle of that whiskey that surfaced where it shouldn't, every bar that hung the name over a door. Most of them were nothing. He chased them anyway."
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Almost a smile. Almost.
"All that. On the chance one of them was me."
"On the chance," I said. "He never stopped looking. Neither did I. I was just no good at it, so I left it to the man who was."
She went quiet again.
"It wasn't only him I was hiding from," she said. "The man who did this, yes. But you, too. All three of you."
I didn't say anything. I'd learned by now that the quiet was where she set the true things down.
"I thought it was you for years," she said.
"On the evidence. I had nowhere else to point it, so I pointed it at you.
But the night it happened, it moved like a betrayal from inside, not a hit from outside, and some splinter of me never sat all the way easy, even while the rest of me built the case.
And about eighteen months back, the frame got too clean to pretend otherwise.
You were set up. You were going under my family's name the same way I lost everyone to it.
I could have come to you then. Pooled what I had. We'd be years further on than we are."
Something in me wanted to argue the last of that.
To tell her the years weren't hers to shoulder, that the arithmetic of who could have done what, and when, belonged to all of us and not only her.
I didn't. She wasn't finished, and you learn, eventually, when not to put your hand on a thing a person has carried a long way to set down.
"But the day a living Madigan turns up in a Kerrigan's life," she went on, jaw set against the wind, "the arrangement our fathers made looks real again.
And whoever put my family in the ground wanted that marriage gone badly enough to do it in a single night.
So I stayed away. Told myself it was about not knowing who I could trust, and some of it was.
Most of it was simpler. I wasn't going to be the thing that got you killed the way it got them killed. "
She looked at me then, and fifteen years of it were in her face.
"I stayed gone to keep you breathing," she said. "It was the only thing I had left to give people I owed."
I stood with that. It rearranged some things. All this time I'd thought of her as a ghost who didn't know we existed, and the whole while she'd stood a quiet watch over us from a continent away, and we never once felt it.
By the arrangement our fathers made, I had a claim on the woman standing next to me at that wall.
The oldest kind there is. Written before either of us drew a breath, in a language of alliances that never once asked what the two people in it wanted.
A year ago I might have let that mean something.
Standing there in the dark next to what the years alone had made of her, the idea of walking up to her with a claim in my hand was obscene.
Her mother had seen it coming. Her mother built the one door out of it.
Whatever this became, it wasn't going to be because two dead men shook hands over a table before she was born.
If she ever turned toward me, it would be because she chose it, eyes open, owing me nothing.
I decided that at the wall, and I didn't tell her, because it wasn't mine to announce. It was only mine to hold to.
She looked at the water. I looked at the water.
We stood beside each other at the wall on the edge of the headland, above the house that had waited a long time for her to come back to it, and neither of us said anything for a while, and it wasn't uncomfortable. Which was also not what I expected.
"My mother used to do this," she said eventually. "When something was too big for words. She'd just sit with it. With whoever needed sitting with." A pause. "I used to think it was a gap in her coping skills. I understand it better now."
I said nothing.
She nodded once, to herself. Some private conclusion.
Then she turned to me, and even in the dark her eyes were steady and clear again.
Whatever had broken in them a few minutes ago hadn't gone anywhere.
She hadn't buried it or shoved it down. She'd done the thing she did with everything too big to hold in her hands, which was find a way to carry it in her chest instead, and keep walking.
"Thank you," she said. "For the recordings. For keeping them."
"They were always yours," I said.
She held my gaze a breath longer than she needed to.
Then she leaned in, very slightly, out of the wind and into the shelter my body made against it, and rested her forehead against my shoulder.
It wasn't much. A small thing. The specific exhaustion of a person who'd held something up for a long time and needed to set it down for one moment.
I went very still and didn't move and didn't make it a thing.
I kept my eyes on the dark and I breathed, feeling how cold she was, how long she'd stood out here with it before I came.
Her hand came up and gripped the sleeve of my coat. Just briefly. The lightest possible grip, like she wasn't sure she was allowed to and did it anyway.
I reached up and covered her hand with mine.
We stayed like that for a while, the two of us at the wall with the drop in front and the house behind, and for once, the sound of the sea didn't tell me anything I didn't want to hear.
Eventually she straightened. She took her hand back and I took mine back, and she considered the water with the expression of a woman who'd just done something that cost her something and was deciding whether the cost was acceptable.
"You should sleep," she said.
"So should you."
"I will." She glanced back toward the house, at the one warm-lit window. "I think I'm done for tonight."
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.