Her voice was lighter than his. Quicker. She always moved through a conversation faster than anyone else in the room, making the connections and reaching the conclusions while everyone else was still in the middle of their thoughts. I'd forgotten that. I remembered her face and her hands and the smell of her perfume and the way she hummed over a pot, but I'd forgotten the pace of her. The rhythm of how she talked.
I pressed the heel of my hand to my mouth.
I listened to my mother negotiate on my behalf with the precision of a woman who'd thought about it a long time and knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted me protected. Not managed, not handled, not married off for territory. Protected. There was a difference in how she said it, and she made sure the difference was clear.
She should want for nothing, my mother said. Not comfort. Not safety. Nothing. She should want for nothing, and she should know she is wanted, and those are not the same thing, and I will not agree to this arrangement unless both are guaranteed.
I pressed harder.
Both are guaranteed, Ronan's father said. You have my word, and you have it recorded.
Good, my mother said. And then she laughed, the quick private laugh she saved for the moments she'd got exactly what she came in for, and the recording carried it across all those years and set it down in the middle of my bar.
I was not ready. I was not remotely ready. And I was not going to cry in front of these men.
I was absolutely not going to do that.
I reached over and stopped the recording.
The bar was very quiet.
I let my eyes move over the bar. The Madigan bottle. My water glass. Cormac's document, still where I'd left it.
"She sounds like you," Tiernan said, and for once there was no grin under it.
I turned to him.
His face was careful. Warm the way it had been the night before, that quality of attention that read as real instead of performed. Like he was actually in the conversation, not running it from a distance.
"Don't," I said.
He nodded and let it go.
I straightened up. Rolled my shoulders back the way my mother taught me. Spine, Sienna. Always the spine. And I turned to Ronan across the bar.
"Assume I believe you," I said. "Assume, for the sake of this, that the alibi holds and the evidence was planted and you had nothing to do with what happened to my family. That means someone else did. Someone who knew enough about your family to frame you convincingly. Someone with access to the investigation after. Someone who spent all these years knowing a dead girl was alive and aimed at the wrong target." I paused. "Does that mean they've been watching me?"
Ronan was very still.
"Yes," he said. "That's exactly what it means."
"So they know I'm here."
"Possibly. Probably." He let that sit. "Which is part of why we came. Not the biggest part. Part of it."
"What's the biggest part?" I asked.
He looked at me for a moment. Just looked, the way he had since he walked in, like I was something he was still in the middle of believing was real.
"You've been alone for fifteen years," he said. "You shouldn't have been. That's on us for not finding you sooner, and on whoever did this for making sure we couldn't. Either way the result is the same, and the result is wrong." He picked up the Madigan for the first time and held it between his hands. "You shouldn't be alone anymore."
I took him in, then the glass in his hands.
My father's whiskey. My father's name over my door. My father's voice on a phone on my bar, and my mother's laugh still somewhere in the air of the room, like it hadn't quite finished.
"That's a very large thing to say to someone you've never met," I said.
"I know."