“I don’t need to confess anything to anyone. You go.”

“And why would I go?”

He shrugged.

She leaned into the door, took a sniff of the afternoon breeze, her eyes as pained and unreadable as always. He wanted to squeeze her body until his hands fell off.

“What’d you say to Joe?”

She came off the door, folded her arms. “About what?”

“About my boxing.”

She gave him a small sad smile. “I said you’d never box again. Simple as that.”

“Simple, uh?”

“I can see it in your face, Danny. You’ve no love for it anymore.”

He stopped himself from nodding because she was right and he couldn’t stand that she could see through him so easily. She always had. Always would, he was pretty sure. And what a terrible thing that was. He sometimes considered the pieces of himself he’d left scattered throughout his life, the other Dannys—the child Danny and the Danny who’d once thought of becoming president and the Danny who’d wanted to go to college and the Danny who’d discovered far too late that he was in love with Nora. Crucial pieces of himself, strewn all over, and yet she held the core piece and held it absently, as if it lay at the bottom of her purse with the white specks of talc and the loose change.

“You’re coming in then,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She stepped back from the door. “Well, you best get started.”

The Old Men came out of the study for dinner—florid men, prone to winking, men who treated his mother and Nora with an Old World courtliness that Danny secretly found grating.

Taking their seats first were Claude Mesplede and Patrick Donnegan, alderman and boss of the Sixth Ward, as paired up and cagey as an old married couple playing bridge.

Sitting across from them was Silas Pendergast, district attorney of Suffolk County and the boss of Danny’s brother Connor. Silas had a gift for looking respectable and morally forthright but was, in fact, a lifelong toady to the ward machines that had paid his way through law school and kept him docile and slightly drunk every day since.

Down the end by his father was Bill Madigan, deputy chief of police and, some said, the man closest to Commissioner O’Meara.

Sitting beside Madigan—a man Danny had never met before named Charles Steedman, tall and quiet and the only man to sport a three-dollar haircut in a room full of fifty-centers. Steedman wore a white suit and white tie and two-toned spats. He told Danny’s mother, when she asked, that he was, among other things, vice president of the New England Association of Hotels and Restaurants and president of the Suffolk County Fiduciary Security Union.

Danny could tell by his mother’s wide eyes and hesitant smile that she had no idea what the hell Steedman had just said but she nodded anyway.

“Is that a union like the IWW?” Danny asked.

“The IWW are criminals,” his father said. “Subversives.”