8. Cillian
CILLIAN
Two months in and I know I’m completely, thoroughly, irreversibly fucked.
Not operationally fucked. I know how to handle that. I’ve been handling that since I was fourteen and Connor first put me in a room with men twice my size and told me to figure it out.
No, this is the domestic kind of fucked, which is worse, because there is no response to waking up at four in the morning and lying there listening to your wife breathe.
This is the kind of fucked where you’re holding a Post-it note that says arrogant turtle in Mandarin and you’re smiling at it before you remember you’re not supposed to be smiling at it.
The Post-it notes start on a random day.
I came into the kitchen and there was a small yellow square stuck to the espresso machine.
I peeled it off and studied the words. It looks like Italian, but I have no idea what it said. I googled it.
Testa dura. Hardheaded.
Which—alright, that’s not exactly an insult, at least to me it isn’t. I stood there with my coffee deciding what to do about it. I did nothing.
Instead, I went to work.
When I came home there was one on my laptop in French—têtu comme une mule. Stubborn as a mule. I still said nothing. This is clearly a game and I’m good at games.
Two days later, she put one on my bathroom mirror in what the camera app told me was Mandarin: arrogant turtle. Something must be lost in translation because I fail to see what would be so arrogant about a turtle.
Nevertheless, I took it down and put it in my jacket pocket. I told myself I needed to throw it away later, but I never did.
The next morning there is one on my coffee mug. She’d drawn a tiny crown on this one, underneath the Greek—arrogant king.
A king, huh? I don’t think she meant for it to be a compliment, but I’ll damn well take it as one.
“Are you going to keep doing this?” I ask her. She’s sitting at the island in her robe, nursing a cup of coffee. She has her glasses on, trying to make it very clear she’s not watching my face as she “reads” her book.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, without looking up.
“The notes.”
“What notes?” Valentina asks innocently.
I shoot her a look. She looks so entirely unbothered and so entirely full of shit that my stomach flip flops, which it’s been doing a lot recently.
“The notes on my things,” I say, gesturing to my coffee mug. “In languages you know I’ll have to look up.”
She turns a page. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”
I roll my eyes. “Valentina.”
She shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe your things just come that way.”
On Friday I put one on her favorite handbag, using a language I know she wouldn’t understand. Mo phian sa tóin. My pain in the arse.
I’m in Connor’s office by the time she finds it.
The text I get at noon says, this means war, Brennan, and there’s a small, slightly lopsided star drawn in the corner of the message.
Right. So she can give as good as she gets.
I already knew this.
I file the note away in the part of my head that is filling up entirely with Valentina-specific information and try to concentrate on what Connor’s saying.
The war escalates, as wars do. She puts one inside my running shoe in what turns out to be Swahili—mkaidi, stubborn—and I put one in her glasses case in Welsh.
I find a pink Post-It note tucked into my passport three days later in what the camera app, after some deliberation, identifies as Tagalog. Naiinis ako sa iyo. You annoy me. She’s drawn two lopsided stars next to it.
Two stars.
The first one had one star.
The Swahili shoe note, when I go back to look at it, has no stars.
What is the meaning of the stars?
And why do I care?
I put one in her coat pocket that says cailín deacair (difficult girl) in Irish and I draw a small crown next to it because she’ll hate that I’ve outdone her. Crowns obviously outrank stars.
The next morning she comes into the kitchen with the note in her hand and a scowl on her face.
I hide my smile behind my coffee.
“A crown,” she says, raising a brow at me.
I shrug. “It felt appropriate,” I tell her.
She puts the note in the pocket of her robe and goes to the coffee machine.
I notice that she doesn’t throw it away, which is doing very strange things to my heart.
She’s keeping the note.
The coffee situation is its own separate disaster.
She makes her coffee and I make mine. But somehow, she takes mine, drinks out of it, and hands it back before picking up her own cup. Every single morning.
The first time it happens I ask her why. She looks at me over the mug and says, “Yours tastes better.”
“That’s impossible,” I tell her, confusion clear in my voice. “You’ve told me repeatedly that I make it wrong.”
She shrugs. “It still tastes better.”
I have no response to this so now, I make two cups now. But she takes mine anyway. I drink hers, even though it has almond milk in it and neither of us says a word.
We have a bilateral coffee exchange program now that nobody agreed to and both of us have apparently accepted.
This is my life.
Instead of breakfast being quiet with us trying to get out of the kitchen, we argue.
About everything.
We argue about the Knicks—I maintain they’re hopeless but she argues that they’re just one good draft pick away from something.
We argue about whether raisins belong in anything—they don’t, full stop, but she seems to find the dried boogers looking things delicious.
Just the other day we spent forty minutes on whether there’s any legitimate argument for the second season of a television show she’s been watching being better than the first.
I had not seen the show but found myself watching it that evening specifically so I could have the argument properly.
The second season is better than the first, and now I’m addicted to this goddamn vampires and werewolves show.
Fuck.
Last week she left a bookmarked book on the counter.
I read the highlighted section and brought it up over dinner, and we spent forty-five minutes on it.
I did not want the conversation to end.
I need to get a grip.
I’m a grown man.
I operate in rooms with people who are actively trying to kill me and I maintain complete composure.
I am being dismantled by a woman who hides insults around my house and keeps the ones I write back.
The physical thing has also gotten worse.
It was always there, I’ve wanted her from approximately the first ten minutes of knowing her, which is embarrassing, considering I hated her. But it used to be straightforward.
She’s hot, I want her.
That’s a transaction with a beginning and an end. Simple.
It’s not simple anymore.
Now whenever I see her, I get hard. It doesn’t matter if her hair’s done or she’s still half asleep with mascara smudged under one eye and a scowl because the coffee isn’t ready yet.
My brain just—stops. Goes completely offline. I’ve put a mug down because my grip wasn’t reliable.
I’ve read the same line of a report three times because she walked past my desk.
I had a full conversation with Connor last week that I can’t entirely account for because she’d come out of the bathroom twenty minutes before in just a towel and the image was apparently still running somewhere in the background.
There’s also the bakery on 67th. She mentioned it once, maybe two weeks ago, in passing— something about her father taking her there as a kid. She moved on and I don’t think she even noticed she said it.
But I noticed.
Now I go past it on my way home most evenings like some kind of idiot, debating if I should go in there and get her something.
That’s a normal thing to do, right?
To be aware that she’s mentioned a bakery?
Yes, it is.
I’ll stop there and get her something. I’ll get her the whole entire store.
The point is—and I do have a point under all of this—I’m completely gone on my wife. I didn’t see it coming, or I saw it coming and told myself I didn’t, which amounts to the same outcome. She’s in my head all the time and she’s become what I’m walking toward at the end of every day.
But I have a job to do, and I should probably focus on that.
Connor’s had suspicions about the docks for three months. Word got back to him that product was going missing between the ship and the warehouse.
Not enough to be obvious, but just enough to be a pattern if you were paying attention, and Connor is always paying attention. The numbers pointed to someone on the inside giving cover, someone who knew the schedule well enough to know exactly which nights to skim.
It took eight weeks to get a name.
Mickey Sheehan.
Forty-three, two priors, and works the overnight manifest checks. He has been supplementing his income in ways Connor finds offensive.
Mickey doesn’t know we know.
That’s the point of tonight—get the confirmation, the names of whoever he’s been moving the product to, and make sure he understands that this particular revenue stream is finished. Connor doesn’t send three people to a warehouse in Queens at eleven at night for a conversation.
We catch him coming off his shift. He’s cutting through the south lot toward the parking structure, keys already out.
He doesn’t clock us until he’s about fifteen feet away.
I watch the exact moment it happens—the way he slows, processes the three of us standing between him and his car, and does the calculation.
His eyes go to the exit behind him.
Ryan’s already there.
Mickey looks back at me.
“Hey,” he says, with the specific brightness of a man who has decided to try charm first. “Cillian, right? Brennan’s—”
He runs anyway.
They always run.
He gets about six feet before Doyle has him by the collar, then it’s not much of a contest—Mickey’s soft as shit, and Doyle is not.
A minute later, Mickey’s in a chair in the warehouse with zip ties on his wrists and the brightness completely gone from his face.
“Okay,” Mickey says, breathing hard, looking between the three of us. “Okay. I don’t—look, whatever you think—”
“Save it,” I tell him boredly, rolling up my sleeves. Mickey blanches, his ruddy face turning white.