I sat in the rental on the side of the N67 with my hands on the wheel and watched the water and breathed through it until thetightness went manageable, and then I pulled back onto the road and kept driving.
That was the only time.
Dunraven came up twenty minutes later.
Smaller than I remembered. That's always how it goes. The places that were enormous in childhood turn out ordinary-sized when a person comes back with adult eyes. The town sat on a curve of coastline under the cliffs, stone buildings clustered around a harbor where the fishing boats still went out in the morning the same as ever. The church spire. The market square. The pub on the corner that was there before anyone alive remembered and would be there after all of them were gone.
I drove through the center without stopping.
People noticed the car the way people in small towns notice unfamiliar cars, with the automatic mild interest of a community that knows its own. I kept my eyes forward and my speed steady, and I was through and out the other side in four minutes, and then the road climbed toward the cliffs and the estates and everything I'd come back for.
The Kerrigan estate sat at the top of the coast road on thirty acres that had belonged to the family for two hundred years. I'd driven past it once, seven years ago, in a different rental with a different name, doing recon I never fully used. I remembered the gates, iron and old, set into a stone wall that ran the property line, and the long drive up through the trees, the glimpse of the house at the top. Gray stone, tall windows, the kind of solidity that comes from being built by people who meant to stay.
I pulled up to the gates and stopped.
They were open.
I didn't move right away.
You don't have to do this,said the part of my brain that kept me alive all these years by being suspicious of everything.Youcan turn around. You have the documents he sent. You have enough to work with from Chicago. You don't have to be here.
I looked at the open gates.
I drove through.
The trees on either side of the drive were old and tall, and the October light came through them in long pale columns that shifted as I moved. The drive curved once, twice, and then the house came into full view. I stopped the car without meaning to and just took it in.
It wasn't what I expected, which was strange, because I had photographs. I'd done the research. I knew exactly what this building looked like from outside. But photographs don't carry the weight of a thing. The way it sat in the land like it grew there instead of being built. The warm light in the ground-floor windows against the gray. The roses along the front wall, bare now in the season, climbing the stone in patterns that said someone had planted them on purpose and tended them with care for a long time.
Someone stood at the front door.
Ronan.
Hands in the pockets of a dark jacket, watching me with that stillness I'd worked out was just how he existed and not something he put on for the occasion. He didn't move when I pulled up. He waited.
I got out of the car.
The air hit me first. Cold and salt-edged and impossibly familiar, the specific air of the Dunraven cliffs that I'd breathed every day of my childhood and not once since the night I ran. My body knew it before my brain did. Something in my chest loosened and tightened at the same time in a way I had no words for and didn't go looking for any.
I got my bag from the trunk and walked to the door.
Ronan watched me come.
Up close, he was the same as he'd been in Chicago, which meant big and steady and carrying something behind that managed face he never quite set down. He'd changed out of the jacket from the bar. He looked more himself here, though I had no basis for the thought. Just the sense that a man like this belonged in a place like this in a way that didn't survive hotel lobbies and early airports.
"You came," he said.
"I said I would."
His jaw eased. "You did."
We stood there on the front step of the Kerrigan estate in the October air with the sea somewhere below the cliffs, grinding at the rock the way it did long before either of our families. I looked at this man and he looked back, and I thought about my father signing a contract in this house with Ronan's father, neither of them knowing what was coming.
"Where are the others?" I asked.
"Tiernan's in town. Back by evening." A pause. "I thought you might want to get settled first. That a few hours might be easier than all three of us at once."
I met his eyes.
