The drive back to the city that night was quiet. Now Devlin remembered wondering if Maryellen had been cowed by the power of the emotions involved in a life she had dismissed as beneath her. Probably not. What had Alice thought of Maryellen? Devlin had seen. Even in her grief, Alice had not been able to keep herself from taking odd moments to study the grim, ice-cold Maryellen. It wasn’t that Alice had disliked Maryellen so much as she had felt sorry for her cousin.

Always the asshole.

Some dream. He could have expected a dream of Sussex after last night’s fool’s errand to Lake Tranquility, and he could have expected a bad dream after learning of Jack Brennan’s murder. But what Devlin had dreamed of was the death of a child. At thirty-eight, Eileen had no time to waste, and while her father was alive, she didn’t want to marry outside the church, not if there were a chance that she could.…

It might have been the same nightmare without any killings. If Jack Brennan had lived through his appointment at the Waldorf Towers, a little later at dinner he would have sat, welts and all, near the cardinal—who might just have remembered later, when reviewing Devlin’s annulment petition, the resurrection of Irish power in the city. What did a Frank Devlin and his petition mean in the scheme of those things? Now the cardinal was going to remember something else. The Brennans had always been big contributors to the church. Three months from now, the cardinal could decide that the Brennans had suffered enough. Three months? Try six months. Would Devlin have to wait six months before bringing up the subject again? That brought them to next year. What else could Devlin have dreamed of but a dead baby?

Eileen would be thinking of all this soon enough. He didn’t know what he was going to say to her. This wasn’t simply battle damage, it was heartbreaking defeat. Some dream. The child he had begun to believe would be born was probably already dead. No good to protest any injustice, that the hopeful father-to-be was a relatively innocent victim, not quite as innocent as Cousin Alice, for instance, dead herself now at least a dozen years. The news had come through the Monahan family grapevine, and Devlin’s mother had hesitated for months, almost a year, before telling him, she was so afraid it would knock him off the wagon.