"Yes."
I heard her breathe. In and out, deliberate. The breathing of someone managing something.
"I was angry at first," she said. "When I understood what it was. Another thing decided in a room I wasn't in." A pause. "And then I kept listening. And I heard the rest of what she said."
I waited.
"She didn't decide it for me," Sienna said, and something in it had gone very level. "That's the part that took me apart. She could have. Every rule she was raised under said she could. Instead she built the whole thing and then handed me the last of it. Said her daughter chooses, or it doesn't happen." Her voice did something small. "She understood what my life was going to cost me before I did, and she made sure the one thing nobody could take was mine to give. And she was right, and I never got to tell her so."
Her voice broke. Just slightly. Just for a second. The fracture of someone whose control slipped one notch before she caught it.
She turned her face away from me, out toward the drop, and put the back of her hand to her mouth, breathing through it with the fierce focus of a woman who learned to breathe through things because the alternative wasn't on offer.
I didn't reach for her. I closed the arm's length between us instead, slow, and set my forearms on the cold stone of the wall beside hers, near enough that she'd feel the bulk of me there against the wind if she wanted it, and I kept my eyes on the middle distance, trying to make myself as undemanding as a man my size can be.
She breathed. I waited. The sea moved below us, steady and uncaring and constant, the way it moved the night everything burned and every night since.
After a while, she took her hand from her mouth.
"I've been alone a long time," she said. Not to me, particularly. Just out loud, into the wind, the way she had atdinner. Setting something down because she needed to put it somewhere.
"I know," I said.
"I'm not saying it to make you feel responsible." A pause. "I'm just saying it."
"I know that, too."
"You're not the only one who's been alone in it," I said.
I hadn't meant to say it. It came the way true things come when the hour's late enough and the dark's big enough to hold them.
"A house this size isn't supposed to be lonely. But the frame didn't only bury your people. It buried mine, slower. When the story went round that we'd butchered the Madigans, a respected family, one we'd just sworn a marriage to, nobody stopped to ask whether it was true. It was the worst thing a house could do, and we apparently did it. So they cut us off. Allies first. Then the neutral ones. Then the men who saw a poisoned name and an opening."
I looked down at the black water.
"My father spent the years he had left trying to clear it. Got close enough that they killed him for it and dressed it up as ordinary business. My mother went after, the quiet way people go when the fight's left them. My uncles scattered or died in it. It came down to me and the two men who didn't leave." A breath. "So, no. Not the only one who's been alone. I've just been alone in a full house. I'm told that's its own kind of loneliness."
She looked sideways at me. Even in the dark I made out the shape of her face turned up, and I knew the exact color of her eyes that no photograph ever caught. Green, but the dark green of this same sea on an overcast day, the color that ran in the Madigan line for generations, that her father had, that she inherited, that I'd been told about and never expected to be standing close enough to see.
"You're not what I expected," she said.
"What did you expect?"
She thought about it. "Something easier to be certain about."
I looked at her. She looked at me. The wind moved her hair across her face and she didn't bother with it.
"I'm sorry," I said. "For what happened to your family."
She was quiet a beat. "You didn't do it."
"No. But it happened, and you've been alone because of it, and I'm sorry for that." A pause. "I should have found you sooner. I should have kept looking when the trail went cold instead of telling myself it was closed."
"You couldn't have found me," she said. "I was very careful."
"You were a ghost," I said. "You weren't found by luck. Tiernan ran your family's name down for years. Every bottle of that whiskey that surfaced where it shouldn't, every bar that hung the name over a door. Most of them were nothing. He chased them anyway."
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Almost a smile. Almost.