“Grazie così tanto, signore.”

“Siete benvenuti. Siete per avere così bello fortunato una moglie, signore.” The man clapped his hands and gave them a broad smile and went back behind the counter.

“What did he say?” Nora said.

“He said it was a nice night out.” Danny stirred a lump of sugar into his coffee. “What brings you here?”

“I was out for a walk.”

“Long walk,” he said.

She reached for the cup of sugar between them. “How would you know how long a walk it is? That would mean you know where I live.”

He placed his pack of Murads on the table. Christ, he was fucking exhausted. “Let’s not.”

“What?”

“Do this back-and-forth.”

She added two lumps to her own coffee and followed it with cream. “How’s Joe?”

“He’s fine,” Danny said, wondering if he was. It had been so long since he’d been by the house. Work kept him away mostly, meetings at the social club, but something more, too, something he didn’t want to put his finger on.

She sipped her coffee and stared across the table with her too-happy face and her sunken eyes. “I half thought you’d have paid me a visit by now.”

“Really?”

She nodded, her face beginning to soften from its cast of false gaiety.

“Why would I do that, Nora?”

Her face grew gay again, constricted. “Oh, I don’t know. I just hoped, I guess.”

“Hoped.” He nodded. “What’s your son’s name by the way?”

She played with her spoon, ran her fingers over the checkered tablecloth. “His name’s Gabriel,” she said softly, “and he’s not my son. I told you that.”

“You told me a lot of things,” Danny said. “And you never mentioned this son who’s not a son until Quentin Finn brought it up for you.”

She raised her eyes and they were no longer bright, nor were they angry or wounded. She seemed to have reached a place beyond expectation.

“I don’t know whose child Gabriel is. He was simply there the day Quentin brought me to the hovel he calls a home. Gabriel was about eight then, and a wolf would have been better tamed. A mindless, heartless child, our Gabriel. Quentin is a lesser creature among men, of that you’ve seen, but Gabriel? Sure now the child was molded from devil’s clay. He’d crouch for hours by the hearth, watching the fire, as if the flames had voice, and then he’d leave the house without a word and blind a goat. That was Gabriel at nine. Would you like me to tell you what he was like at twelve?”

Danny didn’t want to know anything more about Gabriel or Quentin or Nora’s past. Her sullied, embarrassing (and that was it, wasn’t it?) past. She was tainted now, a woman he could never acknowledge as his and look the rest of the world in the eye.

Nora sipped some more coffee and looked at him and he could feel it all dying between them. They were both lost, he realized, both floating away toward new lives that had nothing to do with one another. They would pass each other one day in a crowd and each would pretend not to have seen the other.