We step apart. I mount my wagon, and set my horses trotting off at a determined pace. She watches me go from the coach house door. It’s not like the last time I sold everything I had. Back then I was leaving home behind, but now there’s a different kind of desperation driving me. Not a running-from but a running-to. Sarah’s my home now.

I ride first to Fredericksburg, looking for a buyer, but all I get there is a drunk fool wanting one horse. My best chance is to sell the two horses and forge together, so I take the road up to Washington hoping for more luck in the capital city. I spend too many days asking around and getting nowhere. I try at the guest houses, and down by the docks, and in the shops. I’ve been gone near on two weeks when I ask a blacksmith, hoping he’s nothing like Mister Reardon and that hearing I’m a traveling smith won’t make him want to take a hammer to my head.

He has no interest in buying my traveling forge, and no knowledge of a blacksmith looking for one.

“But there was a guy,” he tells me, “looking for forge and smith.”

I ask where I can find him, and he says, “Georgetown. Below Bridge Street. Down where the Irish stay.”

I bristle when he says it, wondering if he knows I’m Irish, and if he won’t buy my forge because of it. I wonder if there really is a guy, or if he was just building up to tell me to get where I belong. Below Bridge Street. My eyes flick to the doorway, looking for the No Irish sign, but it’s not there. Maybe he’s not being hostile. Puzzling through people’s prejudice is maddening.

I do go down to Georgetown the next day. Even if no one’s looking for a forge and smith, even if it was a way to tell me I don’t belong, it’ll be good to be around my fellow countrymen. I stop into a tavern and ask, again, if anyone’s interested in buying a traveling forge and two good horses, or knows someone who is. It turns out there is an Irishman down from New York looking for a blacksmith and forge who’d surely like a word with me. I hadn’t expected it to be true. The barkeep says he’ll get word to the man to meet me there that evening, and when I come back the person waiting for me is none other than Ennis Flanagan.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I can’t believe it,” Ennis says, wrapping me in a bear hug and patting at my arms like he’s making sure I’m flesh and bones and not some trick of the light.

We take stools at the bar, grinning at each other like boys.

“When you disappeared, I thought the Dead Rabbits got you for sure,” he says.

I feel a sliver of guilt. He took me in off the boat and I should have let him know I was all right when I got the job with Mister Reardon. I’d been too afraid of the Dead Rabbits to go back to the Five Points. And too afraid it’d get back to Mister Reardon that I was Irish.