Respectable. Shit.

He held out his hands, at a loss for words.

“Now it’s my turn,” she said. “I’ll be the respectable one.”

He shook his head. “No.”

And he could tell by the fury that sprang into her face that she’d misinterpreted his meaning yet again. He had meant to imply that respectability was a goal unworthy of her. But she took it to mean it was something she could never attain.

Before he could explain, she said, “Your brother’s asked me to marry him.”

His heart stopped. His lungs. His brain. The circumnavigation of his blood.

“And?” The word came out as if strangled by vines.

“I told him I’m thinking about it,” she said.

“Nora.” He reached for her arm but she stepped away.

“Your father’s in the study.”

She walked away down the hall, and Danny knew, yet again, that he’d failed her. He was supposed to have responded differently. Faster? Slower? Less predictably? What? If he’d dropped to his knees and made his own proposal, would she have done anything but run? Yet he felt he was supposed to have made some kind of grand gesture, if only so she could have turned it down. And that would have somehow balanced the scales.

The door to his father’s study opened as he stood there. “Aiden.”

“Danny,” he corrected him through gritted teeth.

In his father’s study, the snow falling through the black beyond the windows, Danny sat in one of the leather armchairs that faced the desk. His father had a fire going and it reflected off the hearth and gave the room a glow the color of whiskey.

Thomas Coughlin still wore his uniform, the tunic open at the neck, his captain’s bars sitting atop the blue shoulders while Danny wore street clothes and felt those bars smirking at him. His father handed him a scotch and sat on the corner of the desk.

His blue eyes cut through his glass as he drained it. He poured a refill from the decanter. He rolled the glass back and forth between his palms and considered his son.

“Eddie tells me you went native.”

Danny caught himself rolling his own glass between his palms and dropped his left hand to his thigh. “Eddie over-dramatizes.”

“Really? Because I’ve been given cause to wonder lately, Aiden, if these Bolshies didn’t rub off on you.” His father gave the room a soft smile and sipped his drink. “Mark Denton is a Bolshevik, you know. Half the BSC members are.”

“Gosh, Dad, they just seem like cops to me.”

“They’re Bolsheviks. Talking of a strike, Aiden? A strike?”

“No one’s said that word in my presence, sir.”

“There’s a principle to be honored here, boy. Can you appreciate that?”

“And which one is that, sir?”

“Public safety above all other ideals for men who hold the badge.”

“Putting food on the table, sir, that’s another ideal.”

His father waved at the sentence like it was smoke. “Did you see the paper today? They’re rioting in Montreal, trying to burn the city wholesale right to the ground. And there’s no police to protect the property or the people and there’s no firemen to put out the fires because they’re all out on strike. It might as well be St. Petersburg.”