Page 39 of The Dangerous Dance

"You're very observant," I tell her.

"I'm a Costello," she says. "It's a survival skill." She drops her eyes from the ceiling back to me. "You're also observant. But you already know that." She considers me. "What you're less practiced at is what to do with what you observe when it's about yourself."

I look at her. "That's very specific."

"You made a face when I mentioned that Roise loves him. You controlled it immediately but you made it first." She says this without cruelty, just with the precision of someone reporting what they saw. "You've been doing that since yesterday. The face, and then the control."

"Occupational reflex," I say.

"Yes," she agrees. "But the thing before the reflex is real too." She stands from the arm of the couch. "I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable. I'm just telling you that you don't have to manage everything you feel in this room. Roise is on a call. It's just me." She heads toward the kitchen. "Do you want tea or would you prefer something that's not a comfort beverage because you've decided you don't need comfort."

I look at her.

"Tea," I say.

"Good." She fills the kettle. "My brother is a complicated man. I say that as someone who loves him and is also under no illusions about him." She speaks with her back to me, the practical tone of someone who's decided the conversation can happen without direct eye contact and is therefore more likely to happen honestly. "He's been trying to be better. He's been trying for a while, and it's not performance. I know the difference." She turns to get the mugs. "But he carries a lot. The things he did, the things he didn't do, the things that happened on his watch. He doesn't let go of any of it."

"I know about Rina," I say.

"Then you know it's not just guilt about the act. It's guilt about the person he was who was capable of it." She sets two mugs on the counter. "He's been very careful since. About not doing things he can't take back. About being someone who chooses rather than someone who just acts." She looks at me over her shoulder. "He brought you here rather than handling it. That's not nothing."

I think about the night I walked into the warehouse with the receiver in my hand and put it on the table between us. About the way he didn't move. About how he said all right and then we'll need somewhere quieter than this, and the somewhere quieter has been five days above a laundromat with a circulation check on the zip tie the first night that he undid himself before morning.

"I know," I say.

She makes the tea. She brings it over. We sit at the kitchen table in the particular quiet of two people who have just said several true things and are letting them settle.

"You could stay," she says. "If things go the way they might go. There'd be a place for you." She says it carefully, without pressure, the way you say something that is an offer and not a condition. "Not because of him. Because you're useful and because you're clearly capable of being—" She searches for the right word. "Honest. When you decide to be. Which is rarer than people think."

I wrap both hands around my mug. Outside, Roise's voice from the other room, professional and precise, wrapping up the Cork call.

"I'm not—" I start.

"I'm not asking you to decide anything," Mackenzie says. "I'm just saying it exists."

I nod.

We drink the tea.

He comes back at five, which is an hour later than he said, and the explanation he doesn't give but which is visible in the set of his shoulders is that whatever he went to handle required more than he budgeted for it. He looks tired in the familiar way and he looks at the three of us in the kitchen — me and Mackenzie at the table, Roise closing her tablet — with a cautious expression, the kind men have when they've left women in a room together and are not certain what they're walking back into.

"How was it," Mackenzie says.

"Fine."

"You're an hour late."

"It ran long."

She looks at him with the specific expression of a sister cataloguing a non-answer. "Roise and Nadia helped on your Cork correspondence." She says it with the precise neutrality of someone dropping information and watching what it produces. "With me sitting in. Roise verified everything."

He looks at Roise.

Roise looks at her tablet. "The contact responded within the hour. It went well."

He looks at me.

I drink my tea.