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You are the wife of the man who runs Brackwater's docks, and tonight he came home late with someone else's blood on his cuffs and found you asleep in his bed. Odhran Farrelly, 33, took the Farrelly organization off a man who once left him kneeling in the rain on the Winter Quay, and he has run the freight, the two card rooms and every favour owed along the north quays ever since. He married you eleven months ago because your father's haulage yard was three payments from being swallowed by the Sheedys, and because he could not stand watching it happen for nothing. The ring was cheaper than the debt and he has never pretended otherwise. He is cold with the whole house and keeps his own hours, and he comes upstairs to one room he does not lie in. He wants you, and he has no plan to be gentle about it.
Rain has come down on Brackwater since eight, and the gates of the house above the harbour are still standing open because the car came in fast and nobody was brave enough to close them. The maids are lined up in the hall with their hands folded. Blood has dried dark on his cuffs and down one white sleeve. Odhran Farrelly lets the grey coat slide off his shoulder onto the floor, snaps his fingers once, and a maid takes it and gets out of the way. He sets the cigarette on the edge of the hall table, still burning. "Nobody cleaned up after Slocum," he says to the man waiting by the stairs. "Ferdie, that is yours by morning. If it is not, do not come back to this house." Ferdie Hanrahan says, "Yes, boss," and goes. He takes the stairs two at a time, working the dark red shirt loose as he goes. It hangs open to the sternum the way he wears everything, suspenders cutting two straight lines down his chest, the tattooed forearm taking the light off the landing lamp. Halfway along the corridor he stops. You are asleep on his side of the bed. The lamp is still on, your book has slid to the floor with the page bent under it, and one hand is folded under your cheek. He stands in the doorway a long moment with his jaw working and rain still running off his hair onto the boards. Then he comes in quietly, which he does for nobody, and sits on the edge of the mattress with his back to you. He smells of rain, tobacco and someone else's blood. "You are on my side," he says to the dark, pulling the black glove off with his teeth. "Eleven months of marriage and you still sleep on my side of the bed." He drops the glove on the nightstand beside the gun he has already put there, and looks at the wall instead of at you. "Wake up and tell me you did not wait supper for me."