As he’d suspected, her motherly instincts overcame her need to make him feel guilty. Something about a hungry child, no matter what his age, was a temptation no woman could resist. She laid her mending aside and rose instantly. “You get washed up. It’ll only take a minute. I’ve got a stew I just made today, your favorite. I put carrots in it, just the way you like.”

Frank washed up at the kitchen sink and dried his hands and face on an immaculate towel. Everything in the apartment was immaculate, in fact. The floors were spotless, the furniture polished and shining, even the windows shone. Frank almost felt like he was contaminating the place by his presence. Another reason to stay away.

As if he needed one.

Sitting down at the scrubbed table, Frank remembered the meal he’d eaten with Sarah Brandt. Although her cooking wasn’t up to his mother’s standards, she’d been a lot better company. Or maybe that was just because they’d only been talking about his work. Frank always felt comfortable when he was talking about his work. His mother, of course, never wanted to hear about what he did. What he did frightened her, and besides, she had her own world. And her own concerns. Frank was sometimes one of them.

She worked in silence, heating the stew. The rich aroma made his stomach clench painfully, and he tried to remember why he hadn’t stopped for lunch today. A stool pigeon had kept him busy most of the afternoon, a little weasel of a man who claimed to know who had robbed that big warehouse on the docks. If Frank could solve that case, he’d be able to add a reward of several hundred dollars to his savings. A promotion to Captain cost $14,000, or at least it used to, before Roosevelt and his reformers took over. But the reformers wouldn’t last. Someday soon things would be just the way they used to be, and Frank would need that $14,000. He still had a long way to go.

His mother set the plate down in front of him, and he looked at her-really looked at her-for the first time since he’d come in. She was tired. And when had her hair gotten so gray? She was a small woman, shorter than average, and over the years her once-trim figure had broadened in the beam, but she was still a long way from fat. Frank could remember her working long days over a washtub to bring in extra money when he and his sisters had been young. He wondered vaguely how a woman so small had managed such hard physical labor, something he’d never even considered before. She hadn’t seemed small then, since he’d been a child himself, and he hadn’t thought of those days in years, not since he’d gotten work and been able to ease her load somewhat.

Frank shoveled in a spoonful of stew and chewed gratefully. “This is good, Ma,” he said, startling her. But his mother wasn’t one for compliments, and neither was he. She was instantly suspicious, and went on the attack.

“He’s asleep, and thank you for asking,” she said tartly, taking a seat opposite him so she could glare.

Frank allowed himself another bite of stew. “I figured. It’s late.”

“Is that why you waited until now to come? So he’d be asleep, and you wouldn’t have to see him?”

“I waited until late because that’s when I was finished with my work,” Frank said. He tried not to sound defensive, but the stew suddenly tasted like sawdust in his mouth. He broke off a piece of bread, dipped it in the gravy, and stuffed it in his mouth defiantly. “You know I work long hours. You know I can’t get home very often.”

“You got home easy enough when Kathleen was alive,” she reminded him.

“I was a patrolman then. I worked my shift and went home.” The shifts had been twenty-four hours long, too, so he really hadn’t been home a lot, even in those days. But his mother wasn’t going to be bothered by facts when she had a point to make.

“He asks for you. I don’t know what to tell him.”

He really wanted to kill her then, for telling such an awful, hurtful lie. “He doesn’t talk, Ma. He can’t talk.”

“He talks. He don’t talk plain, like you and me, but I understand what he wants. I show him your picture, the one of you and Kathleen when you got married, and I tell him, ‘That’s your Da.’ And he asks for you. He knows who you are, even though he don’t see you more than once in a blue moon.”

“I’ve got my job to do, don’t I?” he asked, hating the guilt he felt clawing inside of him. Hating her and himself and everybody in the world.

“You’ve got more than one job, Frances Xavier Malloy.”

“Only one that puts food on the table and a roof over your head. Over his head. Or would you rather live on the streets?”

His feeble attempt to make her feel guilty in return failed miserably. She was the master at it. “Finish your supper,” she told him, as if he was a boy again. “Then you can go in and see him.”

What a rare treat, he thought bitterly. By now the delicious meal was a leaden lump in his stomach, and whatever appetite he’d had vanished. “I’ll see him now,” he said resignedly, throwing down his spoon and pushing his chair back with a scrape.

“Now, Frances, finish your supper,” she tried, but he was gone to do his penance, opening the door to the bedroom.

The room was dark and silent except for the rasp of breathing. His mother’s bed took up one corner and the crib the other. The light from the gas jet in the kitchen spilled in, enough for him to see when his eyes had made the adjustment. Every instinct told him to flee. Every instinct rebelled against putting himself through this. It never got any easier. If anything, after three years, it was harder than ever to look upon the face of disaster, but still he forced his footsteps across the few feet of floor to the side of the crib.

The crib was large, larger than a regular baby’s crib. A carpenter had built it for him special. A necessary expense that had come out of his captain’s fund. Not that he begrudged the money, but still, every dollar that came out would mean he’d need that much longer to gather enough money. Time he didn’t have to waste.

Frank wrapped his fingers around the side railing of the bed and looked down. The face lay in shadows, but Frank could see it well enough. He knew it by heart, after all. The beautiful face. Kathleen’s face shrunk down to child size. Kathleen’s beautiful blue eyes, closed now in sleep, thank God, so he didn’t have to see them and feel the pain he still felt every time he looked into them and saw only emptiness.

His son and heir. The blanket covered his twisted legs, the legs that would never walk, and the night had closed the empty eyes so Frank wouldn’t have to see that no matter what his mother said, his own child didn’t recognize him and probably never would and would most certainly never call him by name.

They’d told him the grief for Kathleen would dim with the passing of time, but he still felt it fiercely each time he saw his son, the legacy of her awful, needless death. The pain in his heart was like a gaping hole, a bottomless pit he could never fill, no matter how hard he tried. He’d been holding on for three years, now, and if he ever let go, he might fall into that pit and lose himself forever.

How many times had he been tempted to do just that? Only one thing had stopped him. His son. Kathleen’s son. The boy who would grow tall but who would never grow up, who would need someone to look after him for his entire life. Frank was that someone, and so he had to make Captain, to make sure his son would never want for anything as long as he lived.

Without consciously deciding to, Frank reached down and stroked the red-gold curls that his mother refused to cut. They felt like silk beneath his rough fingers, and the boy stirred slightly in his sleep.

That was when Frank understood about Alicia VanDamm. She’d been just as helpless as his boy, in her own way, helpless and afraid and no one had taken care of her. That was wrong. Frank knew it in the depths of what little soul he still possessed. He wouldn’t be able to right that wrong. He wouldn’t be able to help Alicia VanDamm. She was long past such help now, but at least he could avenge her death. A blow for justice in an unjust world. Usually, Frank didn’t feel he could afford the luxury of justice, but just this once, and just because he had Sarah Brandt to help him, he was going to indulge himself.