Page 75 of The Dangerous Dance

"You've slept with her," she says.

I hold her gaze. "Yes."

She nods. Once. And then she does something I didn't entirely expect, which is that she doesn't say anything else about it. She picks up her phone and sends a message and sets the phone on the desk and says: "I've sent her my number. If she needs to move, she calls me."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet." She meets my eyes. "Friday. The fight. You're going to tell him about Connolly first."

"Everyone keeps telling me that."

"Everyone is correct." She holds my gaze. "And Liam. After the fight — whatever the outcome — don't let it sit. Talk to him the same night."

"I know."

"You'll both need to."

I look at her. "I know."

She stands. At the door she pauses. "She's good for you," Ailish says. Not warmly. Just the flat factual version of an observation made and delivered. "Whatever the complications. She's good for you."

She goes before I can respond.

Roise comes at nine.

She works for two hours at the kitchen table while I work in the study, and we interact twice — once when she has a question about the Galway-7 follow-up, and once when she brings me coffee without being asked, which she sets on the corner of the desk and then stands for a moment in the way of someone who has decided to say something and is deciding whether to say it.

"Roise," I say.

"I know," she says. "I'm not—" She stops. "I put in my notice with the agency. The placement agency." She meets my eyes steadily. "I'll finish the current work, the Galway correspondence and the Bayonne supplementals. I'll make sure the handover is clean. But after that — I think it's better."

I look at her. "You don't have to⁠—"

"I know I don't have to." She says it without bitterness. "I'm choosing to. Because it's better for the work and it's better for me. To not be in a situation where professional and personal are arranged the way they've been arranged." She holds my gaze. "That's not your fault. It's just true."

"Roise." I look at her. "You're exceptional at this work."

"I know," she says, with a slight quality that is almost wry. "I'll be fine." She picks up her tablet. "I'll have the Galway response finished by noon."

She goes back to the kitchen.

I sit in the study and I think about what it costs when the things you don't choose correctly hurt people who don't deserve it, which is a thought I've been having in various forms for several years and which has not become easier with repetition.

I add it to the weight of what I'm carrying into Friday.

I find Declan at the east building at six in the evening.

He is where I expected him — in the room off the main hall that he's claimed as a workspace, the one with the bad lighting and the view of the internal courtyard that he's preferred since he was eighteen and first started spending time at the east building because our father worked from here on Thursdays and Declan wanted to be near him.

He looks up when I come in.

He reads my face the way brothers read each other — fast, involuntary. He sets down his pen.

"Liam," he says.

"I need to tell you something," I say. "Before anything else. Before what I came here to say." I come into the room and I sit in the chair across from him, which is not how I planned this — I planned to stand, to keep the authority of posture — but something about the room and the bad lighting and the specific geography of my brother's face makes sitting the right choice.

He waits.