Chapter 13: Ninety-One Rungs

Ronan's POV

I told her I would wait at the water tower, and I did.

It stands on the hill above the south quay, four hundred yards from Chester's boathouse.

I climbed to the catwalk with binoculars and a radio that did not make a sound.

Her borrowed car sat on the side street with its engine cold.

She had been inside for twenty minutes.

I had given her my word that I would not follow her, and I was a man standing on a tower with a pair of binoculars on her.

I decided I could live with that.

In my jacket was a folded file, soft at the creases from two years of carrying.

The police report on my father.

A page of notes in my own writing.

A photograph of Erin at the harbor range, taken from a car, with a rifle on her shoulder and her hair tied back.

I had meant to hand it to her on Wednesday.

Instead she had told a kitchen full of staff what she planned to do to me after the vote, and the cook had started clapping.

I had looked at her across that table and known I would lose her the moment I opened my mouth.

So I had kissed her instead.

I was not proud of it.

I put my thumb on the casing on my key ring.

I had found it at fifteen, on the roof of the old cold-storage building across the water, in a drift of gull dirt.

The police had never searched that roof.

I had told no one.

For seventeen years I had carried the only proof of who fired.

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