Page 106 of Ruthless Claim

CILLIAN

I should have told her.

That’s where I keep landing. Every time I sit in this study with the door shut, that’s the thing I come back to.

I should have told Valentina the minute I hung up. I should have walked into the kitchen and said, “I got a call from a woman I knew nine years ago. She says she has something to tell me and I don’t know what it is yet.”

But I didn’t.

I made the calculation I always make. Get the information first. Know what you’re dealing with before you bring it to someone else. Keep the blast radius small. Handle it.

I’ve been handling things for twenty years this way and it has mostly worked.

The blast radius is not small. It’s my pregnant wife crying on the other side of our bedroom door and the words that’s just something Connor would do ringing in my head.

I should have told her.

The call came two weeks ago.

It was an unknown number and I almost let it go to voicemail. I’m in the kitchen making coffee, while Valentina is in the study on a gallery call.

I can hear the particular crispness of her professional voice through the door, and for whatever reason something makes me answer.

Some instinct, the kind you develop in a job like mine where unknown numbers are either nothing or something and the odds of nothing get worse the longer you’ve been at it.

“Cillian Brennan?” A woman’s voice comes through from the other end. I frown. She has an Irish accent, but it’s hard to place.

The hairs on the back of my neck go up.

“Who’s asking?” I say as I pause my handling of the coffee machine, throwing my whole attention to this conversation.

“It’s Claire.” A beat. “Claire Murphy. From Belfast.”

I frown. I’m somehow pivoted to face the window, my eyes staring at the early morning beauty of Central Park, trying to place the name. Claire Murphy. Belfast. Why does that sound familiar?

“You stayed at the Merchant Hotel,” she says, when I don’t answer. “And you frequented The Duke of York on Hill Street. You were there for a summer.”

Specific memories come flying back at me. I was in Belfast nine years ago and I stayed at The Merchant for the first three weeks. I also went to The Duke of York.

The barman didn’t ask questions, the whiskey was good, and the lighting was dark enough that you could sit with your thoughts without anyone bothering you about them.

I walk to the balcony door, step out, and pull it shut behind me.

The air hits me, cool and sharp, the smell of the city coming up from thirty floors below—a mixture of exhaust and the faint sweetness from the pretzel cart on the corner.

“Okay,” I say carefully, refusing to comment on where I stayed. “What’s this about?”

“Not on the phone.” Her voice is steady, but there’s a tightness underneath, like a person barely holding themselves together. “I need to see you. In person. There’s something you need to know.”

I frown, curling my fist on the cool and damp iron of the balcony. “That’s vague.”

“I’m aware.” Then she says quietly, “I wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t important. I’ve been trying to decide whether to do this for a long time.” Another pause. “Please.”

I look at the park before I cut my gaze back toward the house. Through the glass behind me I can see the edge of the kitchen, and beyond it, the closed study door.

“Where?” I ask.

Belfast in the summer smells like rain and fried food and, underneath all of it, the estuary. The sky stays light until ten at night, which bewilders me. You think it’s earlier than it is and then suddenly it isn’t. I’ve been here three weeks and the work has been, well, I don’t want to think about the work. I’m thinking about the work anyway because that’s what I do at the end of every day here when I sit at the bar at The Duke of York and wait for the whiskey to take enough of the edge off that I can go back to the hotel and sleep.