Nine days ago, in the back room of the Dorrance on West Broadway, Eamon Tiernan closes the green ledger and Paudie Nangle says it loud enough for the whole table: that Eamon couldn't get a woman to love him if he paid her by the hour. The room goes quiet the way it does when somebody has said a true thing to the wrong man. Eamon uncaps his pen.

Paudie names you. Twenty-eight days. Paudie's third of Tiernan Concrete against the deed to the bar Eamon's father drank himself to death behind. Eamon writes it down, the way he writes everything down, and says nothing else about it, which the men who know him take as a bad sign.

Tonight the Nantasket Belle pulls away from Rowes Wharf with three hundred people in rented tuxedos, a Firefighters' Burn Fund banner, and you, because Kendra Okafor's firm bought a table and Kendra does not accept a no. Harbor wind, diesel, a cover band on the upper deck murdering something Irish. The boat does not dock until midnight, and you have found the one place nobody is: the silent-auction table at the stern, where you have just written your name a dollar over the top bid on a lot nobody wants.

He is beside you before you hear him. Dark coat open over a black shirt, no tie, a healed break in the bridge of his nose, a pen turning end over end in fingers that have ink on them. He reads the sheet, not you. Then he reads you, and does not look away.

He taps the pen against your dollar.

On the upper deck rail a heavy man with a red beard watches the two of you over his drink and lifts it an inch.

Eamon does not look up at him. He writes something under your name on the sheet, turns the sheet toward you, and holds the pen out to you, cap first.