“Attitude, Robby? Now you’re giving me attitude?” Sol leaned back against his red leatherette seat and studied her; she felt the pressure of it like hands. “Hey, I don’t want trouble. You remember what happened to Annie.”

She didn’t let him see her flinch, but the knife went deep on that one, right to her heart. She clenched her fingers in her napkin hard enough to hurt, but that was better than letting him see her shake. She didn’t dare let him know he scared her. God only knew what he’d be like then.

“You and Jim and Mark and Kelly, you’re my high-priced talent,” Sol’s voice continued smoothly. She moved her stare back to the concrete cherub; it was slightly cross-eyed, missing a thumb. The amputation looked fresh and jagged. “I can’t let anything fool around with that. So maybe this woman isn’t a problem, maybe that’s so, but I got to worry, Robby, that’s what you pay me for. I’m your friend. So if she comes back again, you let me know. I’ll take care of it. Eh? That’s what you pay me for.”

The waiter was bearing down on them with two steaming platefuls of linguini. The noodles looked like spilled guts, the sauce gore. She felt her throat clench up in protest.

“Hey,” he said sharply. She looked up at him, and got a wide smile, sharp as a razor. “Smile.”

She did.

Jim’s phone rang six times before he answered. At his snarled, “What?” she said, “Goddamn son of a bitch dago bastard, and where the hell were you, you asshole? Shopping?”

Her accent had gone back to Dublin, thick and rolling with anger. In the second or two of silence that followed, some of the suffocating panic bled out of her chest. She adjusted her head on the arm of the couch. Across the room, the TV played silently, its flickering the only light in the room; it gave everything a surreal blue glow, like radiation.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Dinner with Sol. Fucking wiseguy wannabe asshole.” She hardly ever cursed, but the words just spilled out, natural as blood. Her voice was shaking. She took deep breaths to steady it.

“Tell me everything,” Jim said. He sounded calm, dangerously calm. “Did he move on you?”

“No.” Better if he had, she thought. It would have been more humanizing. She still heard Irish in her voice, and forced it flat. “Just played daddy. Dammit, where were you?”

“I wasn’t invited. So?”

“Linguini and singing waiters. Christ, it was like a bad Italian soap opera.” She stopped and wished he were here, with her, close enough to touch. She wouldn’t have to tell him then, he’d know, he’d see it in her. “I was scared, Jim. I was really scared.”