Now, standing with their coffee on the rooftop, looking at the damage strewn below them in the gray light of an overcast morning, she placed a hand on Danny’s lower back. It was the lightest of touches and just as quickly removed. When Danny turned, she was chewing the edge of her thumb and her eyes were moist.

“You’re not going to work today,” he said.

She shook her head but said nothing.

“Nora.”

She stopped chewing her thumb and lifted her coffee cup off the parapet. She looked at him, her eyes wide and blank, unreadable.

“You’re not going to—”

“Yes, I am,” she said.

He shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want you out on those streets.”

Her shoulders moved almost imperceptibly. “It’s my job. I’m not getting fired.”

“You won’t get fired.”

Another tiny shrug. “And if you’re wrong? How would we eat?”

“This will be over soon.”

She shook her head.

“It will. Once the city realizes we had no choice and that—”

She turned to him. “The city will hate you, Danny.” She swept her arm at the streets below. “They’ll never forgive you for this.”

“So we were wrong?” A well of isolation sprang up inside him, as desolate and hopeless as any he’d ever known.

“No,” she said. “No.” She came to him and the touch of her hands on his cheeks felt like salvation. “No, no, no.” She shook his face until he met her eyes. “You weren’t wrong. You did the only thing you could. It’s just…” She looked off the roof again.

“Just what?”

“They made it so that the only choice you had left was the one sure to doom you.” She kissed him; he tasted the salt of her tears. “I love you. I believe in what you did.”

“But you think we’re doomed.”

Her hands trailed off his face and fell to her sides. “I think…” Her face cooled as he watched her, something he was learning about her, her need to treat crisis with detachment. She raised her eyes and they were no longer moist. “I think you might be out of a job.” She gave him a sad, tight smile. “So I can’t be losing mine, can I now?”

He walked her to work.

Around them, gray ash and the endless crunch of glass. Scraps of bloodied clothing, splattered pies on the cobblestone amid chunks of brick and charred wood. Blackened storefronts. Overturned carts and overturned cars, all burnt. Two halves of one skirt in the gutter, wet and covered in soot.

It didn’t get any worse once they left the North End, it just got more repetitive and, by the time they reached Scollay Square, larger in scope and scale. He tried to pull Nora to him, but she preferred to walk alone. Every now and then she would glance the side of her hand off his and gave him a look of intimate sorrow, and once she leaned into his shoulder as they climbed Bowdoin Street, but she never spoke.