Sickness crept into his face, and he braced himself on the tilting boxes in the corner. For the first time, he looked as heartbroken as I remembered. I wasn’t sure how to console him or if I even wanted to. Instead of trying, I sent him outside and put on the dress. It fit well enough—if anything, it was loose—but the bright orange kept leaping at the corner of my eye and tricking me into thinking I had caught fire. This city’s Gilda would have grown into a garish adult. Bex Red would have loved her.

We walked, and I did my best to explain what had brought me here. I told him of the Westside and the shadow city and Galen Copeland’s death and the war between Van Alen and Barbarossa. Every name was familiar to him, and every one made him shudder.

“But I haven’t seen Galen in years,” he kept saying, as though that could protect a man from dying.

“The Galen you know is probably fine. In any case, he’s immaterial. It’s the Copeland from my city—the dark New York—that was helping Barbarossa trade liquor for guns, and who got killed for it.”

“Barbie killed him?”

“I don’t think so. Eddie Thorne claims he did it, but he lies.”

“Now that’s enough. Edward Thorne is one of the most decorated detectives in the department.”

“He’s a liquor-addled waste of a uniform who saw a chance for power and took it. He has a partner. I’m here to find him.”

We walked up Fifth Avenue, because New Yorkers who wander away from Washington Square always walk up Fifth Avenue. The shop windows were unbroken, and the clothes were lit from below with more light than I had seen on the Lower West in years. The sky was melting from black to gray. Garbage men, milkmen, and paperboys walked the avenue, fat and happy and utterly without fear.

“What about your parents?” Virgil asked me. “Are they like Mary and me?”

I could have told the truth. It would have given me a chance to hear consolation from the man whose voice I treasured above all others. It could have smoothed the shrapnel lodged in my heart, the jagged metal I had spent two years ignoring. But this man was not my father, even if he talked like a self-educated street kid, even if his knuckles were as cracked as an old boxer’s, even if he smelled like the finest father in the world.

“Identical,” I said.

“And are they happy?”

“I would like to think so, but it’s so hard to be sure.”

“Your mother, is she a strong woman?”

“Like Manhattan schist.”