CHAPTER 29 Nadia #2
"That you were dangerous and principled and had a history you were trying to make up for and that you weren't the same as your file suggested you'd be." I hold his gaze. "The last part wasn't in the file. That part I found out myself."
He looks at me for a moment.
"Turn around," I say.
He blinks. "What."
"Turn around. Face the other way." I make a gesture that indicates the chair orientation. "You've been standing up all day and your shoulders are carrying it and you look like someone's been putting weight on your neck since approximately nine this morning."
He looks at me with the expression of a man who is not accustomed to being told to turn around in his own kitchen.
"Liam," I say.
He turns around.
I come around the table and I stand behind him and I put my hands on his shoulders, which are, as observed, carrying approximately the entire day in them.
He goes still in the way he goes still when something catches him off guard — not the guarded stillness but the receptive kind, the kind that means he's allowing it.
I work through the tension with the focused attention I bring to things that require precision, which this does.
Ballet training produces, as a side effect, an understanding of how bodies carry stress and where they put it, and his body is putting it in the specific places that come from sitting at a desk and standing in meeting rooms and conducting the kind of sustained performance of authority that this life requires constantly.
He doesn't say anything.
I don't say anything.
The kitchen is quiet and outside Ciarán is presumably doing his rotation and the fig tree is being bare and reproachful in the garden and the city is doing its city thing beyond the walls.
After a while he says, without turning around: "The security detail."
"Yes," I say.
"Two of them. Not four. And Ciarán doesn't knock unless there's something that requires knowing."
"And I can go to the ballet studio," I say. "With two of them. Not inside. Outside."
A pause. "Yes."
"And the garden," I say. "On my own."
"The garden is enclosed. Yes."
I work through a knot below his left shoulder blade that has the specific quality of something that's been there for longer than today. "All right," I say.
"All right you accept it or all right you're still angry about it."
"All right I accept the revision," I say. "I'm still reserving judgment on the rest."
"That's fair," he says.
I work through the knot.
He exhales — not dramatically, just the specific exhale of someone whose body has released something it's been holding, which is the thing that happens when you work through the right point with the right pressure.
"You're good at that," he says.
"I'm good at most things," I say.
"I know," he says. "It's one of your more exhausting qualities."
I stop.
He turns around and looks at me with the expression that is not quite the almost-smile and is fully the actual smile, which is rare enough that I've started cataloguing it with the involuntary attention I bring to rare things.
"I'm not exhausting," I say.
"You decoded the patrol pattern on the first morning," he says. "Ciarán told me."
"Of course I decoded—"
"And you reorganized the kitchen."
"The previous organization was—"
"And you did three hours of floor work in my sitting room."
"There's no barre," I say, with the specific dignity of someone making a reasonable point.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
"You're not exhausting," he says. "You're—" He finds the word. "A lot."
"A lot," I say.
"In the best possible sense."
"That's a diplomatic revision."
"I'm a diplomatic man."
"You're genuinely not," I say. "You're one of the least diplomatic men I've encountered. You say things directly and then you look at people while they process it."
"I say true things directly," he says. "There's a distinction."
I look at him.
He looks at me.
Outside, Ciarán completes a rotation. The fig tree continues being bare. The coffee on the table has gone cold.
"The Marco meeting," I say. "When it happens. I want to be prepared."
"I'll brief you on what he needs to know and what he doesn't need to know and where the line is."
"I'll draw my own line," I say. "But tell me what you'd prefer and I'll take it into account."
He holds my gaze for a moment. "That's more compromise than I expected."
"You gave me the garden," I say. "And two instead of four."
"And the ballet studio."
"And the ballet studio," I agree. "I can work with that."
He nods. He picks up the cold coffee and looks at it and sets it down again. "There's food," he says. "Mackenzie brought things this morning when she came for the briefing."
"I know," I say. "I ate some of it."
"Did she notice."
"She noticed and approved," I say. "She told me I needed more than crackers."
He almost laughs. "She's right."
"She usually is," I say. "It's one of her more exhausting qualities."
He does laugh at this, brief and real, and the kitchen catches it and holds it for a moment and the day which has been the particular long kind arranges itself around it.
"Eat something," I say. "And then tell me about the Marco conversation. All of it."
"It's a lot," he says. "It took forty-five minutes."
"I know," I say. "I'll listen to all forty-five minutes."
He looks at me.
"Liam," I say. "I've been in this kitchen for four days. I have extensive capacity for forty-five minutes of information."
He gets up. He gets the food Mackenzie left, which is the elaborate kind because Mackenzie's food always is. He sets it on the table. He sits back down.
And he tells me about Marco.
And I listen.
And outside Ciarán does his rotation.
And the fig tree is bare in the garden.
And the house in Carroll Gardens is warm.