I got water for everyone, and we sat down.
The four of us around the kitchen table in the Kerrigan estate on a Wednesday in October, sea somewhere out the black windows, fire going in the corner, lamb stew steaming in the middle of it all, and nobody said a word right away. Not awkward. It wasn't awkward. It was four people who each had a great deal to say, choosing the order to say it in.
Sienna looked at the food.
"My mother used to say a good meal was the only honest conversation," she said. Not to anyone. Just out loud, the way you say a thing you've carried too long and need to set down somewhere with witnesses. "That you could lie with words but you couldn't lie with food. Either you fed people well or you didn't."
She picked up her spoon. Tried it.
"This is good," she said. Flat voice, but the flat was doing a lot of lifting. She went back in for a second spoonful before she’d finished saying it, which told me more than the words did. "This is very good."
"Careful," I said. "I'll get ideas."
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Nearly. "Don't."
Ronan made a sound that might've been the front end of a laugh and thought better of it. Cormac reached for the bread.
We got on with it, the talk coming in pieces, unforced, the natural build of four people sharing a table and finding each other's edges. I asked her about the bar and she answered straight, no dodge, which I clocked as a good sign. Ronan talked about the town, which buildings had changed and which hadn't,how Dunraven had gone quiet as the young ones left for the cities.
She asked questions, and they were the good kind, the ones that show you what a person actually thinks instead of what they'd like you thinking they think.
"The families that carved up my father's coast after," she said, spoon pausing. "Any of them still around?"
"Two," Ronan said. "One folded on its own. One got absorbed."
"By?"
"Us." He didn't dress it up. Ronan never does.
She nodded slow and went back to her stew, and I watched her put that away somewhere with the rest.
At some point the stew was gone and the bread with it, and I got up and brought the apple tart to the table.
Sienna went still when she saw it.
"My mother made this too," she said, quiet.
"Half the mothers around here," I said, and let her have the lie for the second time.
She looked up at me. Steady. Seeing all of it, the lie and the reason for it both.
"Thank you," she said. Just that. Two words carrying about forty pounds, and I wasn't going to make her set it down and count it out.
"Don't thank me yet," I said. "Wait till you've had it. Could be a disaster. I peaked at the stew."
She tried it.
She didn't say anything. She just closed her eyes for one second, one involuntary, unguarded second, and then opened them and went back to being Sienna Madigan, who shows nothing and gives nothing away.
But I saw it. God help me, I collect them, these seconds she doesn't mean to hand out. That part of me had been filling upsince a Chicago bar a little over a week ago and showed no sign of knowing when to quit. I didn't say a word about it. Didn't make it a thing. A man's got to have some restraint, even when it's killing him.
After dinner she cleared without being asked and washed her own plate.
Ronan watched her do it with the look he'd worn all night, that barely-held thing, and then said goodnight and went back to his study, because Ronan processes by working and tonight there was a lot to work.
Cormac nodded at her once and vanished off toward wherever it is Cormac goes, which I've failed to map in twenty years of trying.
Which left me and Sienna in the kitchen.
