“What?” Joe said, his voice thick. “Why’s everyone yelling?”

“Go to bed,” Connor said.

Ellen Coughlin held out a hand for Joe, but he ignored it. He looked to Nora. “Why’s everyone yelling?”

“Come now, woman,” Quentin Finn said.

Nora said to Thomas, “Don’t do this.”

“I said close that mouth.”

“Dad,” Joe said, “why’s everyone yelling?”

Danny said, “Look—”

Quentin Finn crossed to Nora’s chair and pulled her out of it by her hair.

Joe let out a wail and Ellen Coughlin screamed and Thomas said, “Everyone just calm down.”

“She’s my wife.” Quentin dragged her along the floor.

Joe took a run at him, but Connor scooped him up in his arms and Joe batted his fists against Connor’s chest and shoulders. Danny’s mother fell back into her chair and wept loudly and prayed to the Holy Mother.

Quentin pulled Nora tight to him so that her cheek was pressed against his and said, “If someone would gather her effects, yah?”

Danny’s father held out his hand and shouted, “No!” because Danny’s arm was already cocked as he came around the table and smashed his scotch glass into the back of Quentin Finn’s head.

Someone else screamed, “Danny!”—maybe his mother, maybe Nora, could have even been Joe—but by that point he’d hooked his fingers into the socket-bones above Quentin Finn’s eyes and used them to ram the back of his head into the dining room doorway. A hand grabbed at his back but fell away as he spun Quentin Finn into the hallway and ran him down the length of it. Joe must have left the front door unlatched because Quentin’s head popped the door wide as he went through it and out into the night. When his chest hit the stairs, it pushed through a fresh inch of snow and he landed on the sidewalk where the flakes fell fast and fat. He bounced on the cement and Danny was surprised to see him stumble to his feet for a few steps, his arms pinwheeling, before he slipped in the snow and fell with his left leg folded under him against the curb.

Danny came down the steps gingerly because the stoop was built of iron and the snow was soft and slick. The sidewalk had some slush in the places Quentin had slid through and Danny caught his eye as Quentin made it to his feet.

“Make it fun,” Danny said. “Run.”

His father grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him halfway around, and Danny saw something in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before—uncertainty, maybe even fear.

“Leave him be,” his father said.

His mother reached the doorway just as Danny lifted his father by his shirt lapels and carried him back to a tree.

“Jesus, Danny!” This from Connor, on top of the stoop now as Danny heard Quentin Finn’s shoes slap through the slush in the middle of K Street.

Danny looked into his father’s face, pressed his back gently against the tree. “You let her pack,” he said.