22. Sienna
SIENNA
Galway hadn't changed enough.
That was what got me first, before the solicitor, before any of it.
I'd built the whole drive up in my head as a thing I had to survive, and then we came down off the coast road into the city and it was just there, same as it ever was.
The same gray stone. The same gulls being assholes over the same harbor.
The same light coming flat off the bay, like the place had spent a decade and a half waiting around for me to get over myself and come back.
I'd done recon here. Twice, years ago, in a different coat with a different name, close enough to the truth that it scared me and never close enough to touch it.
I never once went to the solicitor. Couldn't. Walking into Hartigan and Burke and saying the word Madigan out loud would have lit a flare over my head for anyone still watching, and someone was always still watching.
So I circled it for a decade and a half like a dog that wanted the thing on the table and knew what happened to dogs that jumped.
Now Cormac parked two streets back and Ronan walked me in.
The office was up a narrow stair over a shop that sold wool nobody under seventy was buying.
A brass plate gone green at the edges. Inside it smelled like paper and old radiator heat and the particular nothing-smell of a place where serious money got moved very quietly.
A girl at the front desk asked if I had an appointment.
"Tell Mr. Burke that a Madigan is here about her father's file," I said.
She went still for a second. Then she got up fast and didn't walk so much as flee through the back door, and I stood there with my heartbeat going hard against the vest Cormac had strapped to my ribs, and I thought, here we go.
Burke was old. Older than my father would have been.
He came out of the back with his glasses pushed up on his head, stopped dead three feet in front of me, and just took in my face for a long time, the way the recordings had taught me people looked at me now, like they were doing sums, and the sums kept coming out to a dead man.
"Your eyes," he said finally. Quiet. "God in heaven. You have his eyes."
"I've been told."
"He said you might come." Burke's voice did something then, went rough at the bottom.
"He said it could be twenty years. He said if a woman ever came in here with the Madigan green and asked about her father's file, I was to verify her and hand her everything and then forget she'd ever stood in my office.
" He took his glasses off his head entirely, like he needed to see me with nothing in the way.
"All this time I've kept that file. Checked every quarter that it was still where it should be.
I'd nearly let myself believe no one was coming. "
The verification was almost nothing in the end, and somehow that was the part that nearly took me apart.
He didn't ask for ID. He didn't run a test. He asked me what my mother used to hum when she was cooking, because my father had left that as the question, because he knew no document in the world would prove what he wanted proven, but that I would carry the sound of her in me wherever I went.
I told him.
I hadn't said it out loud since I was a girl.
It came out cracked and small and I hated that it did, in front of Ronan, in front of this stranger, but it came out, the old tune my mother sang low over a pot with no words to it, and Burke closed his eyes and nodded once, like something had been set right in the world.
But the tune wasn't the whole of it. My father, it turned out, hadn't trusted a sound to do the entire job either.
Burke opened a drawer and took out a small thing folded in a square of felt and set it on the desk between us.
Then he did nothing but watch my face, the way you watch a face when what it does matters more than anything the mouth can say.
I unfolded the felt, and the floor tipped under me a little.
A Miraculous Medal, cheap silver gone dark, the loop worn thin as wire.
My mother used to pin one just like it inside my coat every winter, low on the lining where it wouldn't show, to keep me, she said, on the mornings she couldn't walk me herself.
Mine burned with everything else. My father had held one back all these years, with a stranger in Galway, for the single purpose of laying it in front of whoever came claiming to be his daughter and seeing what her hands did before her head caught up.
Mine knew. I had it pinned to the inside of my own collar before I'd decided to move, the old motion still living in the fingers all those years on.
Burke let out a long breath, like he'd held it since my father walked out of his office for the last time.
"The tune, and the hands," he said quietly.
"He said a tune could be overheard, given enough years and enough patience.
He said no one could fake what you'd do with that.
" He nodded, settled and certain. "You're hers. There's no question left in it."
"This way," he said.
The file was in a steel box in a back room. It was heavier than a file that old had any right to be, and when I opened it on the table, I understood why.
Ledgers. Real ones. My father's hand, that hard slanted writing I'd have known blind, columns of figures going back years before the night the cliffs burned.
Bank records that didn't match the ones I'd spent a decade reconstructing from scraps, because mine were the version someone wanted the world to see and these were the truth underneath it.
I didn't understand them yet. I was good, but I wasn't an accountant, and the story those numbers told was going to take Cormac and a clear head and probably two days, and we didn't have two days, so I packed them.
Under the ledgers was an envelope with my name on it.
Not Claire. Not Layla. The name I was born with, in my father's writing, the S looped the way he looped it on everything, and I sat down in the chair without deciding to sit down.
"I'll give you the room," Burke said, and was gone.
Ronan didn't go. He didn't say anything either. He just moved to stand by the door with his back to me, giving me what privacy a room could give. I was glad of it in a way I didn't have the spare capacity to tell him about right then.
I opened the envelope.
Sienna, it said.
If you're reading this then I got it wrong somewhere, and I'm sorry. I spent your whole life trying to get it right so you'd never have to read a letter like this one, and if it's in your hands, then I failed you in the only way I ever swore I wouldn't.
So first, before anything else. You were the best thing I ever made.
Better than the business, better than the name, better than any of it.
Your mother and I used to stand in your door at night when you were small and not be able to believe our luck.
I need you to know that. Whatever I have to tell you in the rest of this, I need you to read it knowing that first.
I had to stop. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and breathed through my nose, in and out, the system I'd built for the moments that came at me sideways, and it held, barely, and I kept reading.
Now the hard part. If they came for us, it wasn't an outside thing.
I want you to read that clearly, because it will save your life.
Nobody got past our walls. Somebody opened them.
It came from inside, from a hand I trusted, from someone who sat at our table and ate your mother's cooking and watched you grow, and by the time I understood it, I was already too far behind to stop it.
The ledgers prove it. I couldn't put the name in this letter, because a letter can be taken, and a name in the wrong hands is a thing that gets you killed, and I needed you alive more than I needed you angry.
But the money doesn't lie. Follow the money and you'll find the hand.
Trust the numbers. Don't trust the people.
Not the ones who come to you grieving the loudest. Grief is the easiest thing in the world to wear.
I'm sorry I can't do this part for you. I'm sorry it's yours to carry. Be careful, be patient, be your mother's daughter and keep your spine straight, and when it's done, put it down. Don't let it eat your whole life. Build something. Be happy. That's the only revenge that ever mattered.
Run when you have to. Stand when you can.
I love you, princess.
Dad.
I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough that the radiator clicked off and the room went a degree colder.
Long enough that the thing I'd held behind a wall for so long pushed against it hard enough to crack the mortar, and I let it, for once, for a minute, in a back room over a wool shop in Galway with Ronan Kerrigan standing guard at the door pretending not to hear me come apart.
It came from inside.
I spent fifteen years aimed at the wrong target.
Not the Kerrigans, I'd moved off them a year and a half back, men who were at a funeral in this very county the night my world burned.
Cathal Mulryan. Years of files and aliases and a bar named after my ghosts, all of it narrowing to my father's head of security, the man whose whole job was the doors and who walked out of that house alive when everyone behind them did not.
The man who lived was the man who let them in. It was the one fixed point I had.
Grief is the easiest thing in the world to wear.
It was a strange thing to leave a daughter, and it never once fit the man I'd hunted.
Cathal didn't grieve anyone. Cathal vanished into the smoke and stayed gone.
Whoever my father meant had stayed close enough to weep at the graves.
But I was too tired and too certain to chase the wrinkle of it right then, so I folded it away with the rest.
When I stood up, my legs held, which surprised me. I packed the letter with the ledgers, closed the box, and put my face back on, the dry one, the one that gave nothing away. Ronan turned around when he heard me move. He didn't ask. Whatever he saw, he let it be mine.
"You good?" he said.
"No," I said. "But I'm functional."
"That'll do."
We went back down the narrow stair into the gray.
And that was when it went wrong, because I felt it before I saw it, the way I'd felt the weather turning my whole childhood.
The street had the wrong number of people in it.
There'd been an old man on the corner when we went in, feeding gulls.
He was gone. The bench he'd been on was empty, and a car that hadn't been there before sat at the far end with its engine running and nobody getting in or out of it.
I didn't slow down. The years had taught me you never slow down. I kept my pace exactly the same and put my hand flat against Ronan's back, two taps, the signal Cormac had drilled into all of us in the kitchen the day before like it was nothing, like it was a fire drill.
"We've got company," I said, low and pleasant, like I was telling him about the weather. "Don't look. Two o'clock. Engine running."
Ronan didn't look.
"Cormac," he said into his collar. "We're burned."