As he raced down West Fifty-first Street, the shards twisted deeper, rooting around with agonizing ferocity. Something was wrong, something was wrong. His insides were already shredded when he raced up the stairwell to the brownstone attic they shared with two spinsters. The door to his ma’s room was open. The other boarders and the police formed a wall in the narrow entryway, too thick for him to push through, but he could smell the blood.

She didn’t come out of surgery until Thursday—morning, maybe, though he’d lost all sense of time and space, dimensions folding and tearing and unfolding all around him. The whole world was at once too bright and also nothing but shadows; the hospital was full of thin shapes that scurried away when he looked at them head-on. He could only smell bleach and the blood staining his hands. The doctor will be with you soon, and maybe it had been soon, but it felt like another century.

Once the doctor arrived, Liam wished he hadn’t.

Five blows to the cranium and spinal column with a tire iron. Sustained damage to cerebral cortex, jaw, malar bone. We had to extract the right eyeball.

Might never fully recover.

Her speech is—

The doctor’s words were only whispers, a taunting wind that blew and blew. He’d failed again. He’d thought they were safe at last, that he could leave her alone while he went to school, that they didn’t have to worry anymore, but he’d been so wrong.

He sat on the edge of the twin mattress that smelled like witch hazel. Stared at his mother, her good eye. She stared through him.

What started it this time? he wanted to ask, he wanted to scream. But he already knew the answer: his father needed no reason at all. Just a belly full of whiskey after a night drinking with his red-armbanded friends.

They’d thought his father was dead, for a while. He’d been quiet, absent long enough. Liam had daydreamed about an accident at the docks, a cable snapping free and a crate crushing him beneath it. Maybe he’d been trampled at one of the German-American Bund rallies. Liam had stopped scanning the papers and obituaries, stopped snooping through his mother’s mail. He’d been so sure Kieran Doyle had slipped back into whatever dark and gruesome crevice he called home.