With an exasperated huff and a muttered curse, Andrew jerked his head down the stairs and towards the older apartment's lobby. “Let’s go then, Officer Morgan, if you’re going.”At his urging, Evelyn took the remaining steps to the ground level while he pulled on his coat and then followed. She didn’t resist when he cupped her elbow, steering her past the wall of tenant mailboxes near the lobby door and the short flight of external stairs that would take them to the street level. While she was disappointed to be denied even this brief bit of normality and time alone with Andrew, she could hardly fault Will Morgan for his staunch dedication to the duties assigned him.Perhaps he was a bit over-zealous. After all, since Edward Montero's death over the summer, there'd been little else of any threat. Sure, strange people and stories had surfaced, but even the contact from Miranda Stiles hadn't been dangerous. And she had to admit, the poor fell

With all the windows in the entire apartment thrown open wide to let in the cool night air, Evelyn slumped on the edge of a windowsill. Nearby, an exhausted Mary occupied the dressing table’s stool. Through the kitchen, they heard the return of Andrew, Will and Tank. “We did this wrong,” an exhausted Will said around his hard panting breaths as they entered the former living room in search of the two women. Andrew chuckled mirthlessly, crossing the mostly empty room to perch on the windowsill beside his wife. “Oh, now you tell me.” “Yeah,” Will continued, easing himself to the recently swept and mopped floor, then laying out, spread-eagle, with a low groan. “The stuff that had to go the furthest, we should have taken first. While we were fresh.” “I don’t know. I still think taking the stuff that was heaviest first was a wise move.” Lifting Mary, Tank took the dressing table stool then pulled her onto his lap in an intimate, possessive way. “Th

“Peter!” The shout was accompanied by loud clapping, as if somehow this would encourage some sort of hustle in the boy who loathed the onset of winter weather almost as much as Evelyn did. “Come on, kid! Get a move on or we’ll be late.” With a patient sigh, Evelyn pushed one of the folded mirrors on her dressing table to an angle where she could see Andrew buttoning his shirt behind her. “It’s far too early for it to be this busy in this two-bedroom apartment,” she groused. “He’s talking to a six-year-old boy about getting ready for school, not offering rousing locker room coaching to an entire football team after a bad first half.” Andrew tipped his head back and laughed heartily. “I hadn’t realized it was making you so moody, darling,” he managed once he’d reigned in his mirth. I’ll talk to him this morning about keeping his encouragement to a more manageable volume, but quite frankly, I’m content to tolerate a few loud mornings rather than have to

The silence hung like a thick soupy fog in the library after Octavia James made her undignified exit. Outside, the rain had begun again in earnest and the patters of fat drops against the window glass, the regular ticking of the mantle clock, and the crackle of the fire seemed to come from a distance through it. Almost as if they’d been tamped down and muffled by the tension that still coiled, wraith-like and terrible, into every corner of the large room. It vied for the most uncomfortable aspect of this whole confrontation with the echoes of Andrew and Octavia’s cruel words. Above the rush of blood past her ears, Evelyn could scarcely hear anything else, but her eyes were fixed to Andrew’s profile, slowly relaxing into its usual handsomeness after being contorted with fury. She ached for him, truly, because no matter how much he hid behind that stoic façade, she knew him as a man who felt profoundly—his love was no less fierce than his anger, his joy no less intense than his sadness.

Unlike the poor Red Hook area of Brooklyn where the Sosa family lived, Will Morgan’s family home was in the Dyker Heights community between 11th and 12th Avenues. The neighborhood was affordable to a combination of working class and modestly middle class residents, a great many of whom were hard working immigrants from Italy and Ireland. As Andrew’s Rolls pulled alongside the curb out front, Evelyn watched the three younger Morgan children dart up the staircase into the house. She was pleased to see that the residents here weren’t gaunt or starved looking. Though their clothing was nowhere near the quality or caliber of the high end designs from Moreau’s that she wore, it was clean and well cared for. The children she saw had toys to play with and seemed happy despite the inequity of wealth that divided them from her. She understood from Will that his mother and grandmother were resourceful, and both were good cooks. Like her, they’d learned to