Sienna #2
I'd been back twice. Once at nineteen, once at twenty-two, both times to carry off what the fire had left worth carrying.
I hadn't come since. There'd been no reason.
The place was a shell and a grave and a thing I'd already stripped of everything that could be stripped, and standing in it did nothing but open a wound I needed shut to function.
The gate was where it had always been. Iron, rusted, set in the stone wall that ran the old boundary, the wall my father kept mended the way Ronan's family kept theirs.
Beyond it the drive climbed through dead grass to the black bones of the house on the rise, roofless, the windows gone to empty sockets, the whole of it standing against the gray sky like something the sea had chewed and spat back up.
I got out and walked to the gate and put my hand on it, and that was when I marked the thing that was wrong.
The chain was new.
I knew this gate. I knew it the way I knew my own hands.
The last time I stood here, at twenty-two, the chain was the one my father hung, gone red with rust, the padlock seized so hard I'd had to cut it to get in and had left it cut, because nobody was going to come and find a cut lock on a dead family's ruin.
Nobody came here. That was the whole nature of a place like this.
It was finished. The world had filed it under closed and gone home.
The chain on the gate now was galvanized steel, bright, barely weathered.
The padlock was new, a good one, the kind that costs money and means it.
Someone had stood exactly where I was standing, cut my cut chain away, and hung a fresh one, and locked a gate to a house with nothing left in it worth the locking.
There's no securing a ruin. There's nothing in it to secure. Unless the point was never the house. Unless the point was to know if anyone came, and to keep them out if they tried, and to hold the only key.
I stood there with my hand on a stranger's chain on my own front gate, and the cold came up my spine the way it had outside the bookshop, except this time it had a shape to it.
"You'll not get in that way."
I heard him coming up the boreen a breath before he spoke, which was the only reason I didn't startle, and even then it was close.
An old man in a flat cap, a dog at his heel, the unbothered slowness of someone who'd worked the same fields his whole life and watched the world do its business on the far side of his wall.
He stopped a polite distance off and looked at me, then at the gate.
"Locked up now," he said. "Wasn't, for years. You family?"
"No." Claire, easy, automatic, up out of me before the truth could get to the door. "Writing something. On the old families out this way."
He took that the way country people take a thing they half believe and don't much mind either way. "You're the second, then."
The words went into me like water off the harbor.
"The second."
"Fella came. Month back, maybe less." He scratched the dog's ear with the toe of his boot.
"Older than you. Lovely spoken. Asked about the Madigans that were here.
Asked did anyone ever come back to it." He nodded at the ruin.
"I said no. Nobody's come back to that in years.
He asked was I certain. Then he asked about the girl. Particular, about the girl."
Everything in me went very still.
"The girl," I said.
"The daughter. Said there'd been a young one, a daughter, and did I know had she died in it with the rest or no.
" He shrugged, and it was the shrug of a man with no idea he was handing a dead woman the exact shape of her own hunter.
"I said I wouldn't know it. Long time ago.
He stood at the gate a good long while after that.
Then he thanked me, very nice, and went on.
Put the new lock on not long after, I'd say, though I never once saw him at it. "
He considered the bright chain, mild as anything, like it was a small curiosity and not the thing that had just tipped the floor of my whole life on its edge.
"Odd," he said. "Locking up a ruin. But there's no accounting for people."
"No," I managed. "There isn't."
I thanked him. I don't remember afterward what words I used.
He clicked his tongue at the dog and went back down the boreen the way he'd come, an old man who had just told me, in the flat kind voice of a person remarking on the rain, that a well-spoken older stranger had stood at my family's gate a month ago and asked whether the girl was dead.
Not the families. Me. He had come to ask about me.
I stayed at the gate a while longer, my hand off the chain now, and let the pieces settle into the line I'd trained a lifetime to make them settle into.
A stranger in the bookshop, buying up the histories of the old alliances.
The same stranger here, at my ruin, asking was the daughter dead.
My man in Chicago gone silent inside the same handful of weeks.
It wasn't three things. It was one thing.
One patient hand, moving through the places I'd come from and the people I'd let myself touch, closing slow on the single question of whether Sienna Madigan was still breathing.
And the new lock told me he already half knew the answer. A man doesn't chain a grave he's sure is empty.
I got back in the car. I didn't cry and I didn't shake.
I did the other thing, the one that had kept me alive across a dozen cities and a dozen names, which was go cold and clear and quick.
Whatever this was, it was closer and older and more careful than anything I'd let myself believe, and I was finished working it alone in the dark of my own skull.
I drove up the coast road to the Kerrigans faster than the road wanted taking.
Ronan was at the front door when I pulled up.
Not waiting. Or not appearing to wait, which with Ronan was probably a distinction without a difference. He had his jacket on, like he'd been about to go somewhere and paused.
I got out.
"Good?" he said.
"I went to the bookshop. And the cliff path."
His head came up. "The one at the end of the coast road?"
"Yes."
He was quiet. "Your father used to walk that path. When he visited. My father said he always went to the cliff path."
I didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say on a doorstep that wouldn't cost more than I had on hand. I'd tell them all of it inside, at the table, where it belonged. The bookshop. The gate. The man asking whether the girl was dead. Not out here.
I walked past him into the house. He fell into step beside me without being asked, and we went in together.