“I love you.”

She pushed his head back. “You love yourself, boy. You—”

“No—”

She gripped his ears, stared into him. “Yes. You love yourself. The grand music of it. I’m tone-deaf, Danny. I couldn’t keep up.”

He straightened and sucked air in through his nostrils, cleared his eyes. “Do you love him? Do you?”

“I’ll learn,” she said and drained the rest of her glass.

“You didn’t have to learn with me.”

“And look where that got us,” she said and walked out of his father’s study.

They had just sat down again for dessert when the doorbell rang.

Danny could feel the booze darkening his blood, growing thick in his limbs, perched dire and vengeful in his brain.

Joe answered the bell. After the front door had been open long enough for the night air to have reached the dining room, Thomas called, “Joe, who is it? Shut the door.”

They heard the door shut, heard a soft muffled exchange between Joe and a voice Danny didn’t recognize. It was low and thick, the words unintelligible from where he sat.

“Dad?” Joe stood in the doorway.

A man came through the doorway behind him. He was tall but stoop-shouldered, with a long, hungry face covered in a dark, matted beard shot through with tangles of gray over the chin. His eyes were dark and small but somehow managed to protrude from their sockets. The hair on the top of his head was shaven to a white stubble. His clothes were cheap and tattered; Danny could smell them from the other side of the room.

He gave them all a smile, his few remaining teeth the yellow of a damp cigarette left drying in the sun.

“How are you God-fearing folk tonight? Well, I trust?”

Thomas Coughlin stood. “What’s this?”

The man’s eyes found Nora.

“And how are you, then, luv?”

Nora seemed struck dead where she sat, with one hand on her teacup, her eyes blank and unmoving.

The man held up a hand. “Sorry to disturb you folks, I am. You must be Captain Coughlin, sir.”

Joe moved carefully away from the man, sliding along the wall until he reached the far end of the table near his mother and Connor.

“I’m Thomas Coughlin,” he said. “And you’re in my home on Christmas, man, so you best get to telling me your business.”

The man held up two soiled palms. “My name’s Quentin Finn. I believe that’s my wife sitting at your table there, sir.”

Connor’s chair hit the floor when he stood. “Who the—?”

“Connor,” their father said. “Hold your temper, boy.”

“Aye,” Quentin Finn said, “that’s her sure as it’s Christmas, it is. Miss me, luv?”

Nora opened her mouth but no words left it. Danny watched parts of her grow small and covered up and hopeless. She kept moving her mouth, and still no words would come. The lie she’d given birth to when she’d arrived in this city, the lie she’d first told when she’d been sitting naked and gray with her teeth clacking from the cold in their kitchen five years before, the lie she’d built every day of her life on since, spilled. Spilled all over the room until the mess of it was reconstituted and reborn as its opposite: truth.