Page 4 of The Dangerous Dance

I study her. "You didn't push it."

"He was drunk and angry and done talking. There's a time to push Declan and a time to let him exhaust himself." She meets my eyes steadily. "I know the difference."

She does. She always has. It's one of about fourteen reasons she is invaluable to me, and one of the three reasons having her around Declan right now makes me vaguely nervous in a way I don't examine too closely. "Fine. Keep an eye on what comes in about last night. Movement reports, anything near his usual meeting points."

"Already asked Conor."

"Of course you did." I finish my coffee and stand. "Come to the airport with me."

She blinks. "I'm not your driver, Liam."

"I know that."

"Or your assistant."

"I'm keenly aware. Roise has made the distinction extremely clear this week." I reach for my jacket. "I'm asking you to come to the airport with me because my sister is landing at two and I haven't seen her in four months and the drive alone with my own thoughts sounds genuinely terrible right now. Come or don't."

A beat. Two. Ailish stands. "I'm not sitting in the back."

"I wouldn't ask you to."

The drive to JFK is the first hour I've had in recent memory that doesn't feel like it's made of something flammable. Ailish puts the radio on something I wouldn't have chosen and doesn't talk about Declan or the Italians or Roise or any of it, and I find that I'm able to breathe in a way that the morning hadn't allowed.

"She's going to be trouble," Ailish says, somewhere on the expressway.

"She's always been trouble."

"She's been away trouble. That's manageable trouble." She glances at me. "Home trouble is a different category."

"She's been asking questions," I admit. "About all of it. More than I've answered."

"Mackenzie doesn't stop asking questions just because you stop answering them. She just goes and finds the answers somewhere else."

"I know that."

"She gets it from you."

"She gets it from herself." But I'm almost smiling, which is something. "She and Declan always got along. She might be the only person who can reach him right now without him going defensive."

Ailish is quiet for a moment. "That's not a small thing to put on a twenty-two-year-old."

"No," I agree. "It isn't."

We leave it there.

Mackenzie comes through the arrivals gate with two bags, a coffee she got somewhere in the terminal that she is fully committed to despite having presumably just spent eight hours on a plane, and the particular energy of someone who has decided that being stationary is a personal failing. She is dark-haired like the rest of us, quick-eyed, and the sight of her does something to the stone that's been sitting on my chest since last night.

She stops when she sees Ailish beside me and her face opens into something genuine. "You came."

"He asked nicely," Ailish says, which is not true but goes unchallenged.

Mackenzie drops one of her bags to wrap both arms around Ailish first, which I was fully expecting and am not at all offended by. Then she gets to me, and the hug is fierce and slightly too tight, the kind that communicates something she wouldn't say in words out here in the open.

"You look tired," she tells me.

"Thank you, Kenzie."

"Not bad tired. Just — a lot on your mind tired." She steps back and looks at me with the assessing quality she's had since she was about nine years old and figured out it worked on people. "How bad is it?"