When Danny left the hospital in mid-October, he still dragged his left foot and had trouble lifting anything heavier than a teacup with his left hand. His speech, however, was fully restored. He would have left the hospital two weeks earlier, but one of his wounds had developed sepsis. He’d gone into shock, and for the second time that month a priest had delivered last rites.

After the stories that defamed him in the papers, Nora had been forced to leave their building on Salem Street and had moved their few belongings to a rooming house in the West End. It was there they returned when Danny was released from the hospital. She had chosen the West End because Danny’s rehabilitation would be taking place at Mass General, and the walk from there to the apartment took a matter of minutes. Danny climbed the stairs to the second floor, and he and Nora entered the dingy room with one gray window that looked out on an alley.

“It’s all we could afford,” Nora said.

“It’s fine.”

“I tried to get the grime off the outside of the window, but no matter how hard I scrubbed, it just—”

He put his good arm around her. “It’s fine, honey. We won’t be here long.”

One night in November, he lay in bed with his wife after they’d managed to make love for the first time since he’d been injured. “I’ll never be able to get a job here.”

“You could.”

He looked at her.

She smiled and rolled her eyes. She slapped his chest lightly. “That’s what you get, boy, for sleeping with a terrorist.”

He chuckled. It felt good to be able to joke about something so bleak.

His family had visited the hospital twice while he was still in a coma. His father had come once after the stroke to tell him they would always love him, of course, but could never again admit him to their home. Danny had nodded and shook his father’s hand and waited until he was five minutes gone before he wept.

“There’s nothing to keep us here after my rehabilitation,” he said.

“No.”

“Are you interested in an adventure?”

She slid her arm over his chest. “I’m interested in anything.”

Tessa had miscarried the day before her death. Or so the coroner told Danny. Danny would never know if the coroner lied to save him the guilt, but he chose to believe him because the alternative, he feared, could be the thing that finally broke him.

When he’d met Tessa, she’d been in labor. When he came across her again in May, she’d been pretending to be pregnant. And now, at her death, pregnant again. It was as if she’d had an overpowering need to remake her rage as flesh and blood, to be certain it would live on and pass down through the generations. This need (and Tessa, as a whole) was something he would never understand.

Sometimes, he woke from a sleep with the cold echo of her laughter ringing in his ears.