The doctor’s hands were in his pocket when he turned without another word and walked away.

Danny left the hospital. He was still in a fair amount of pain and made slow progress up Huntington Avenue toward the trolley stop.

He found Nora that night, when she returned to her rooming house from work. He stood with his back against her stoop, not because sitting down was too painful but because getting back up again was. She walked up the street in dusk yellowed by weak streetlamps and every time her face passed from dark into gauzy light, he took a breath.

Then she saw him. “Holy Mary Mother of God, what happened to you?”

“Which part?” A thick bandage jutted off his forehead, and both eyes were black.

“All of you.” She appraised him with something that might have been humor, might have been horror.

“You didn’t hear?” He cocked his head, noticing she didn’t look too good herself, her face drawn and sagging at the same time, her eyes too wide and empty.

“I heard there was a fight between policemen and the Bolsheviks, but I…” She stopped in front of him and raised her hand, as if to touch his swollen eye, but she paused and her hand hung in the air. She took a step back.

“I lost the button,” he said.

“What button?”

“The bear’s eye.”

She cocked her head in confusion.

“From Nantasket. That time?”

“The stuffed bear? The one from the room?”

He nodded.

“You kept its eye?”

“Well, it was a button, but yeah. I still had it. Never left my pocket.”

He could see she had no idea what to do with that information.

He said, “That night you came to see me…”

She crossed her arms.

“I let you go because…”

She waited.

“Because I was weak,” he said.

“And that kept you now, did it, from caring for a friend?”

“We’re not friends, Nora.”

“Then what are we, Danny?” She stood on the sidewalk, her eyes on the pavement, so tense he could see goose bumps in her flesh and the cords in her neck.

Danny said, “Look at me. Please.”

She kept her head down.

“Look at me,” he said again.

Her eyes found his.

“When we look at each other like this, right now, I don’t know what that is, but ‘friendship’ seems kind of watery, don’t you think?”

“Oh, you,” she said and shook her head, “you were always the talker now. They’d have called the Blarney Stone the Danny Stone if they could have—”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t make it small. It’s not small, Nora.”

“What are you doing here?” she whispered. “Jesus, Danny. What? I already have one husband, or haven’t you heard? And you’ve always been a boy in a man’s body. You run from thing to thing. You—”

“You have a husband?” He chuckled.

“He laughs,” she said to the street with a loud sigh.

“I do.” He stood. He placed a hand to her chest just below her throat. He kept his fingers there, lightly, and tried to get the smile off his face as he saw her anger rise. “I just…Nora, I’m just…I mean, the two of us? Trying to be so respectable? Wasn’t that our word?”