“After you broke with me”—her face remained a stone, but he could see the light finding her eyes—“I needed stability. I needed…”

That brought a roar from him, an explosion he couldn’t stop that erupted out of the center of his body and, even as it punched its way along his ribs, felt better than anything he’d felt in a long time. “Stability?”

“Yes.” She hit his chest with her fist. “I wanted to be a good American girl, an upstanding citizen.”

“Well, that worked out tremendously well.”

“Stop laughing.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?” And the laugh finally reached her voice.

“Because, because…” He held her shoulders and the waves finally passed. He moved his palms down her arms and took her hands in his and this time she let him. “Because all this time you were with Connor, you wanted to be with me.”

“Ah, you’re a cocky man, you are, Danny Coughlin.”

He tugged on her hands and stooped until their faces were at the same level. “And I wanted to be with you. And the two of us lost so much time, Nora, trying to be”—he looked up at the sky in frustration—“whatever the fuck we were trying to be.”

“I’m married.”

“I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit about anything anymore, Nora, except this. Right here. Right now.”

She shook her head. “Your family will disown you just like they disowned me.”

“So?”

“So you love them.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Danny shrugged. “But I need you, Nora.” He touched her forehead with his own. “I need you.” He repeated it in a whisper, his head against hers.

“You’ll throw away your whole world,” she whispered and her voice was wet.

“I was done with it anyway.”

Her laugh came out strangled and damp.

“We can never marry in the Church.”

“I’m done with that, too,” he said.

They stood there for a long time, and the streets smelled of the early-evening rain.

“You’re crying,” she said. “I can feel the tears.”

He removed his forehead from hers and tried to speak, but he couldn’t, so he smiled, and the tears rolled off his chin.

She leaned back and caught one on her finger.

“This is not pain?” she said and put it in her mouth.

“No,” Danny said and lowered his forehead to hers again. “This is not pain.”

Luther came home after a day at the Coughlin household in which, for the second time since he’d been there, the captain had invited him into his study.

“Take a seat, take a seat,” the captain said as he removed his uniform coat and hung it on the coat tree behind his desk.

Luther sat.

The captain came around to the front of the desk with two glasses of whiskey and handed one to Luther. “I heard what you did for Aiden. I’d like to thank you for saving my son’s life.” He clinked his heavy glass off Luther’s.

Luther said, “It was nothing, sir.”