The bar was very quiet. I heard the music, low and Irish, my mother's taste. The traffic outside. My own breathing. Nothing else.
"You're telling me you didn't do it," I said.
"Yes."
"You're telling me my evidence is wrong."
"I'm telling you your evidence was put there to point at us," he said. "There's a difference."
I studied his face. The steadiness of it. The way he sat. Not relaxed, not tense, just present, like a man who'd decided he'd be wherever he was and deal with whatever that meant.
"Why would I believe you?" I asked.
"You wouldn't. Not yet." He reached into his jacket, and my hand moved on its own toward the place under the bar where I keep the gun. He stopped dead, both hands coming up slow and visible. "I'm reaching for something I want to show you. Nothing else."
I kept my hand where it was.
He reached back in, slow, and came out with a phone. Set it on the bar and slid it across without crossing onto my side. My eyes went from it to him.
"What is that?"
"A recording," he said. "My father kept recordings of every meeting that mattered in his study. Every deal. Every conversation with your father."
My hand came off the gun.
"That's your father's voice on there," Ronan said quietly. "And yours. Go to the third file."
I didn't move for a moment.
Tiernan and Cormac were dead still on either side of him. Not touching anything, not pushing. Just there. Witnesses.
I picked up the phone. Found the third file. Pressed play.
My father's voice came out of that phone in the middle of my bar on a Wednesday afternoon, fifteen years after the last time I'd heard it, and every wall I'd built between myself and the fact of him cracked so fast and so clean that I had to set the phone down and press both hands flat on the bar and breathe.
I counted the bottles on the back shelf, left to right, until the count was the only thing in my head.
Hold it together, Sienna.
"Take your time," Ronan said.
His voice was different. Not softer, exactly. Less armored than it had been thirty seconds before. Like my reaction had reached through the distance he kept and done something to it.
I picked the phone back up. Pressed play again.
I listened to my father laugh.
I'd forgotten what it sounded like. That was the thing I could never get ahead of, no matter how many times it happened. The way grief ambushes a person with the small things instead of the big ones. Not his face. His laugh. The exact rhythm of it, the way it came from somewhere low, the way it meant he was actually amused and not just being polite.
I listened to him talk. To Ronan's father, about me. About keeping me safe. About the arrangement, mentioned in passing, and about wanting me surrounded by people who'd standbetween me and everything this life does to a person. I stood behind my bar with my dead family's name over the door and listened to the last recorded proof that my father had once existed and loved me while he did.
When it ended, I set the phone down. I didn't look up for a moment.
"There are more," Ronan said. "Hours of them. Your mother's in some." He paused. "I had them copied for you. They're yours. All of them."
I looked up.
He watched me, and there was something in his face that hadn't been there when he walked in. Something careful and raw and very human, sitting oddly on a face built to hide things.