Every hand in the room rose.

“So that our young officer to stage left doesn’t have to count them right here and right now, could I get a show of hands as to how many of you voted in favor of accepting this charter and joining the AF of L? If all of you who voted ‘yay,’ would please stand.”

Danny looked up from the stack in his hands as fourteen hundred chairs pushed back and fourteen hundred men rose to their feet.

McCarthy raised his megaphone. “Welcome to the American Federation of Labor, gentlemen.”

The collective scream that exploded in Fay Hall pushed Danny’s spine into the center of his chest and flooded his brain with white light. Mark Denton snatched the stack of ballots from his hands and tossed them high above his head and they hung in the air and then began to float downward as Mark lifted him off his feet and kissed his cheek and hugged him so hard his bones howled.

“We did it!” Tears streamed down Mark’s face. “We fucking did it!”

Danny looked out through the floating ballots at the men toppling their chairs and hugging and howling and crying and he grabbed the top of Mark’s head and sank his fingers into his hair and shook it, howling along with the rest of them.

Once Mark let him down, they were rushed. The men poured onto the stage and some slipped on the ballots and one grabbed the charter from McCarthy’s hand and went running back and forth across the stage with it. Danny was tackled and then lifted and then passed across a sea of hands, bouncing and laughing and helpless, and a thought occurred to him before he could suppress it:

What if we’re wrong?

After the meeting, Steve Coyle found Danny on the street. Even in his euphoria—he’d been unanimously voted vice president of Boston Police Union 16807 less than an hour ago—he felt an all-too-familiar irritation at Steve’s presence. The guy was never sober anymore, and he had this way of looking into your eyes nonstop, as if searching your body for his old life.

“She’s back,” he said to Danny.

“Who?”

“Tessa. In the North End.” He pulled his flask from a tattered coat pocket. He had trouble getting the stopper out. He had to squint and take a deep breath to get a grip.

“You eaten today?” Danny asked.

“You hear me?” Steve said. “Tessa’s back in the North End.”

“I heard. Your source told you?”

“Yeah.”

Danny put his hand on his old friend’s shoulder. “Let me buy you a meal. Some soup.”

“I don’t need fucking soup. She’s come back to her old haunts because of the strike.”

“We’re not striking. We just joined the AF of L.”

Steve went on like he hadn’t heard. “They’re all coming back. Every subversive on the Eastern Seaboard is raising stakes and coming here. When we strike—”

We.

“—they think it’s going to be a free-for-all. St. Petersburg. They’re going to stir the pot and—” “So where is she?” Danny said, trying to keep his annoyance at bay. “Exactly?”