"You calling him, or standing on the pavement all night," he said through the open door.
"Calling him."
"From out here."
"From out here."
He considered that for a second, then pulled the door shut and left me the cold to myself, which from Cormac is close to a hug.
Truth was I wanted to be the one to tell him, and I wanted to do it with nobody watching. Cormac would've sat there weighing every note in Ronan's voice, and some things a man's entitled to take without somebody in the room keeping a log.
I walked half a block and turned back. There it was over the door, lit amber against the black. Madigan and Sons. Her dead family's name up on a Chicago side street like nothing had ever touched it.
She put it right out there, I thought. Right where anyone could find it.
Someone had. Me.
I took out my phone and stood in the cold and ran the odds on the man I was about to call. Ronan had buried this the only way he knew how, which was to wall it off and never go nearthe wall again. And here I was with a hammer. There's no soft way to hand a man back the one thing he taught himself to stop wanting.
I called anyway. He picked up on the second ring, the way he always does, like he never sleeps the whole way down.
"It's late," he said. Not a complaint. Just Ronan, marking the hour.
"I know."
"You found something."
I looked at the sign one more time, the letters gold and steady and going nowhere.
"We need to talk," I said. "And you'll want to be sitting down."
3
RONAN
Midnight at the Kerrigan estate had its own kind of quiet. Not a peaceful one. Quiet and peaceful aren't the same thing, whatever people who've never lived in an old stone house want to believe. The fire in the study settled with small pops. The sea worked at the rocks below the cliffs, low and constant, the kind of sound a person stops hearing until it's the only thing left to listen to.
I'd stopped sleeping well a long time ago.
The files on my desk wanted concentration and weren't getting it. I'd been on the same page for twenty minutes, reading the same paragraph and taking in none of it. My head kept going where it went whenever I let my guard down in the small hours.
People tell you grief gets lighter. That you learn to set it down and live around the shape of it instead of inside it. Some of that is true. There are whole weeks now, when the work is loud enough, that the weight stays in the corner where I keep it and doesn't move.
Then something small happens. Turf smoke in the evening air. A bottle of Madigan & Sons cracked open at a gathering, that small sound the seal makes. And the corner empties out again.
I never even knew her. That was the part that had no clean place to sit.
The arrangement was older than both of us. Our fathers made it the way those men made everything, over a table, years before there was a Ronan or a Sienna to be told about it. A Kerrigan son, a Madigan daughter, two houses that would be one house when the time came. Nobody asked us. Nobody needed to. I grew up knowing there was a family out west I'd be bound to one day, and a girl somewhere in it I'd stand beside when we were both grown enough for it to mean something.
We never got there. She was a child, then she was less of a child, and the families kept saying next year, when she's older, when it's right. Careful men, taking their careful time.
Then her family was murdered, every last one of them, and there were no more next years to spend.
I was twenty-five and six thousand miles away the night it happened. Old enough to have done something, if I'd known there was anything to do. I have never once talked myself out of that, and I stopped trying a long time ago.
The investigation into who did it never really closed. Not for me. Officially it went cold. The Madigans were dead, their coast quietly carved up and swallowed, and the world moved on the way it always does. I didn't. I pulled threads whenever I found them, chased them into dead ends, and came back to the same nothing with a stubbornness Cormac called punishment.
Maybe he was right.