"One more thing," I said.
He waited.
"Whoever did this." I set the glass down. "When we find them." I held his gaze. "That's mine."
His eyes held mine a long moment.
"We'll discuss it," he said.
"We won't," I said. "I'm telling you how it is."
Another moment.
"Okay," he said. Nothing else.
It was the first promise I'd made out loud in all that time. I'd made plenty of silent ones. In gas station bathrooms and on night buses and standing over the burnt-out shell of my house at nineteen. But I said this one to another person's face, and he heard it, and that turned it into something else. An oath has to be witnessed to be an oath. Otherwise it's just a thing a person tells themselves to keep their feet moving.
Tiernan glanced between us with an expression I didn't have the bandwidth to decode. Cormac watched the middle distance like a man tucking something away to come back to later.
I picked up the Madigan, capped it, and put it back on the shelf.
"Same time next Wednesday," I said. "I'll be ready."
Ronan stood. The other two followed.
He paused at the end of the bar. Just for a moment, just long enough to look at the shelf behind me, at the Madigan & Sons bottle sitting in its place among everything else, with anexpression I knew, because I'd worn it myself every single day for four years.
Like something lost a long time ago had just turned up.
"We'll see you in a week," he said.
They left.
The door swung shut and the bar was quiet again. I stood in my closed bar on a Wednesday afternoon with my father's whiskey on the shelf and my mother's laugh still somewhere in the air. I pressed both palms flat to the bar top and breathed.
The wood was cool and solid and mine. I pressed until I felt the grain of it and the room was a room again.
My father had a rule for the bar that was really a rule for living.
Always be open.
I looked at the door. Then I picked up Cormac's document and went upstairs to the timeline on my wall.
Time to start over.
9
SIENNA
I didn't plan to cry on the drive in.
I planned for a lot of things. For the Irish light in October, nothing like Chicago light, flatter and softer, coming out of a sky that couldn't choose between gray and white and settled on both at once. For the smell of it, salt and peat and wet grass, the smell that lived in the back of my memory in the place where things go when they're too important to forget and too painful to look at straight. For the tightness in my chest that started somewhere around the N67 and got worse with every mile marker.
I did not plan for the moment the sea came into view.
I saw it through the gap in the hills the same way I always saw it as a child. Suddenly, no warning, the road turning and the land falling away and there it was, gray and enormous and completely indifferent to the fact that I'd been gone so long. The same water. The same horizon. The same light breaking on the surface the way it did nowhere else on earth, the light I'd spent all those years telling myself I didn't miss.
I pulled over.
