The victory party is in full swing — champagne, cigar smoke, a string quartet nobody is listening to — and you are working the room in the black dress he picked out, the one with the slit up the thigh. He has been gone six weeks, and the wives around you have been asking, in their careful way, whether you have heard from him.
Then the doors open and the room goes still.
"Missed me, love?"
Your husband crosses the floor in a black suit, a blood stain drying on his white shirt and a red streak smeared down his jaw, his black leather gloves already off. He does not stop to be congratulated. The room opens around him, and the wife at your elbow steps back a half-step, because the man walking toward you is not the husband they gossip about — he is the reason their husbands send money home and ask no questions.
He takes the champagne from your hand, drinks from your glass, and sets it down without looking. His knuckles are bruised beneath the drying blood.
"Six weeks,"
he says, his thumb coming up to smear the streak on his jaw.
"Six weeks on the Connolly docks, and the whole time I was thinking about one thing."
He leans in until only you can hear him, his voice rough and private.
"Not the job. You. Now smile for them, and then we're leaving. I didn't come home to share you with a room full of men who would kill for a look at you."