A/N: Last chapter. Since there are only a few people reading this, I'm going to assume you all know what happens to Nadine at Queenie's party. This first bit is in Eddie's point of view, following that horrific, hedonistic mess. The rest is in third-person.

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She stopped. Blocks and blocks ago. A few minutes, ten, twenty, a half hour. Mae's watch stopped before we even got to Queenie's and she let it lie there, ticking, a few feet to the door with her frock and a bottle of gin. Close to empty, lying on its side, gin leaking out the top and spreading like kerosene, a couple drops like sweat on the rim of the bottle.

Mae looked back as we were leaving. Watching him on the fire escape, broken up and holding Sally's waist and it seemed like everybody was looking back, looking for someone or something to keep moving towards. Mae for him and him for Queenie and Queenie for Black and Mad for Sally…except Sally had nobody.

God, I never saw Mad like that. Never seen her look so lost, like a kid. Maybe that ain't true… a couple weeks before the party Sally ran away… She kept after Sally long after she left off the fire escape with him. But Sally never looked back. Only ever saw ahead. Never batted an eye, not even when Mad screamed for her. Anyone ever said my name like she said Sally's would've meant something to me.

Maybe they deserved each other.

Pressing dark outside, dying dark. Thrill of getting lost gone. You worry about getting found. And I couldn't see straight so Mae had to go ahead, and the kid stayed with me, crying like she did when she first came to us, and trying everything not to show it. Not to Mae or me. She made herself stop, like she was scared, like she was to blame.

She let Mae scout ahead in blind territory, put her arm around me right where I went down, fingers trembling like she was scared I'd push her off me. Put her head on my chest, riding on my steps like she always did, when she was trying to keep up or when she was falling asleep. Let me pick her up when we got to our own street. "No one's coming, right Eddie, no one's coming." Voice blurred and heavy.

"No one's coming, baby."

Pitch black and grey in the apartment, grey and dead and breaking down, breaking apart. I thought Dine was asleep, but she wasn't any heavier for it. Curled up, head on my chest, trying not to cause anybody any trouble.

"Come to bed, honey." Mae was saying, quiet and husky. She reached out to her sister like she'd stroke her hair but Dine winced away. Mae's hand dropped like she'd been burned.

"Lemme put her down to rest." We tried to make it about her. Then we could see ahead. But it couldn't stay like that forever. She balled up on her bed, crushed with guilt, but she wasn't asleep, not all the way.

A curl caught on my shirt. She stirred, reached up, wouldn't let me go, ragged nails on skin, started whispering, swallowing up the words, arms limp, "…love you." Forced out, sleeping with her eyes open. Tried to drag her off, lay her down, but she wouldn't keep still. "No…no…don't lie down, don't…"

Picked her up again, kept strong for her sake. She was freezing, sweating in spite of herself, stirring a few minutes at a time, letting me shush her back to sleep. Not crying now, just scared, not knowing where she was.

Mae was leaning up against the door, watching us, "Might as well set her down for the night," Calm and cold, like a ghost, a shell of the woman who was my wife. If she thought I was listening she had another thing coming. I looked down at her hand, watched her slip the ring back into place. The mask slipped. She looked more a shell than ever. But familiar. A heartbeat, a pulse, a witness. I'd married her, chosen her, hadn't I?

"Lay her down, Eddie."

I couldn't let her sleep in Queenie's dress. She couldn't barely help me. I looked up at Mae, but she didn't move. Her eyes were green and grey and dead and helpless. What are we gonna do? I didn't know. Heard somewhere you're not supposed to let the woman, the girl, wash up. You need something to show the cops. Were we calling them?

"Just leave her, Eddie," For all the world like it was my last chance. My wife was looking at the shivering kid: scared, cold, remote, lost, looking like she wanted to run and run and run and never look back. "C'mon, Eddie. Let's go to bed."

Not for the first time, I hated her saying that. Dine stirred a little, covered her head and moaned. Mae looked scared straight, tried to pull me up. I shook her off. She saw red before we could think, either of us, cutting us all because part of her was shaken, part of her was sorry.

"No time to go to bed with me 'cause my sister played with fire and got herself burned. Got to be first with everyone? Honey, he's fucked over more of us there than we want to remember and we've got reason to suffer. Got to be everybody's fucking martyr. Had to steal your heart all 'cause I wouldn't go back to cry over their goddamn coffins…" Mae slammed the wall, "Oh godamnit…godamnit…" Snarling out, sobbing, clawing at the tears, turning on me, "Dicking around with Kate behind my back, don't go on… Saw your new pound of flesh and took a dive?"

Red, everything red, everything dark, Mae screaming, a loop of the slap, the crash, the stir, the hard, stone laugh, it played over and over. The slam of the door. She went out, she'd come back. Twisted the knife and left us here to bleed.

I crawled back to the kid. She was on her knees, on the bed, up against the wall. Like a ghost in that white shift, Crying with her tears like ice, while I was bleeding on the floor. Dine bent over herself to reach me, not touching but near enough to. You look like an angel…

"Eddie…Eddie…" she twisted her sheet round her hands and cried for me, "Eddie, I didn't tell her, I swear I didn't tell her…"

"Hush that, I know." Was all I managed.

"I was good… wasn't I? No wait…wait…" shrill cat's notes of panic, dress too tight for her heart, "Does she bleed? Does Mae bleed?" She rolled over on the bed, hands up, clutching at her legs, her knees, scratching at the skin to bring feeling, taking blood from between her legs, red fingertips to the side of her face, "Eddie…Eddie…it's so cold…." She was crying again, hands pulling, shaking, at her shift, the hand with blood held out for me.

I stood looking at her for a long time before I lay down next to her. Took her in my arms, in the sleeves of my coat. Drying blood on my arm as she wrapped the sheet, her hand, heart round my wrist where, months ago, she'd wrapped a red ribbon.

She shook like that for a long time, fear pulsing in her veins till sunrise when the rain started and she fell asleep at last. Mouth slack on my hands. It was about then she stopped bleeding, Queenie's frock loose over her shoulders. "Dine," She slipped awake, turned to her back, head on my heart. Hand where I went down. Gentle, healing. "Why didn't you let us help you…" She tightened up in my arms, not looking at me, breath and blood hot even in this chill.

"I keep secrets, Eddie," crushed, broken, by word, by silence, not by action. Dry sobs a room over. Mae'd come back to us, sleeping first, sleeping alone. Dine traced the threads in the skirt faster and faster, blinded. Don't keep his secrets, baby. He doesn't care…

"Eddie, please." She bent up in my arms and coughed, getting rid of the poison, "please don't say it.

She listened to Mae a room over. Not wanting me to choose, praying for the choice I'd made now, for her and in her favor. "I always…I always…" breath shuddering in. Cleaner, more easily held with every breath, a breath forward from the night, from a room and a darkness a city away. She looked out at the rain, "I always dreamed…I'd tell my sister about my wedding night." She pulled back in my arms, crying when she had nothing else to say or to regret.

I didn't know yet Mae and her cried for the same regret that night, into that morning, and it broke them for a long time after.

--

Were we calling them? She'd asked him. Bitter mockery, crafted in layers from a grain of truth.

Who would believe them?

Nothing they'd seen would mean much of anything. They were drunk, all of them. It acted as a cover for the people they wanted to protect and as an excuse for ignoring the people they didn't. Eddie and Mae and their witnesses were spread like criminals throughout the city, and none of them very likely to talk to the cops. The only one who hadn't drank had no reputation to make her case, and besides, shook up as she was, liar that she was, she was no traitor. This, of course, meant Queenie, and not for their sake would she turn on Jackie. She might never forgive, but that was her affair.

Then there was the girl. That she was underage at a foreseeably chaotic, lace-and-leather-sheathed frenzy was their fault. That she'd wanted to go was her own. Cause for a quiet reprimand, maybe, by the temperance officer that would surely oversee the hearing.

That she herself had been drinking was not a great offense in and of itself. Merely the result of the catalyst she and her guardians had provided. That she'd been high on cocaine, and here they would hedge on whose fault that truly was, perhaps less so, but still…how much could she really remember? And how much, more importantly, would she want to remember? The law did not trust psychoanalysis, even then, and she had no case.

So she'd bled. It was a start. But not enough to prove it was as bad as they said it was. She'd been touched, no way to prove by whom. Violent, no doubt, but, and they would give her sorry looks, there was no way to be sure of these things. Poor girl, gone astray,

they would think, and might even touch her shoulder and imply that she, good Catholic girl that she was, should pray for forgiveness of her own soul.

What do you mean? She might have said. And here, the delicacies implied in their hostile stares over her shoulder would take bitter, poisonous form.

How strange that she'd been accompanied here only by this shadow, you said she had a sister…? They would ask prying questions, learn whom he was married to, and then smile coldly, knowingly. They would note how the girl looked back at him when they asked her a question, noting the atypical tension between the two, and the unusual affection…

Their questioning would turn again to abuse. Then the two of them together would shut down. Nadine, though as a child taught to trust the police, put her faith in the law and in the authority of those around her, would abandon coached stability for instinctual safety. She would call the questioner an ugly name and go back into her brother's arms. And Eddie, compelled out with his dignity, would be given one single reminder that he had no right to bring suit against a white man.

And that would be that. They would not risk, Eddie decided, the reality of such an interrogation. Even once they'd finished at the station, investigations would be made, a background check on the child, perhaps, and if Eddie wanted to keep her they would have to disappear.

On Nadine's part, it was clear that she wanted to forget. Nothing about her was consistent any longer. She stayed motionless for days, staring out the window, not sleeping, not eating, not speaking to anyone. Mae said she was praying, and to leave her alone.

It was when the dry heaves started in the night, and she screamed in her sleep about broken glass and blood, that she started to disappear. For nights stretched longer and longer, until she didn't return at all. The first time she gave Eddie cause to worry, she was found on Madeleine's doorstep, waiting for the woman to return home for a day and a half, and finding no relief.

Then, drifting closer and closer to the Bowery, there were days when no one saw her, merely caught glimpses of her or fragments of speech. Eddie was reluctant to go near her. She knew the danger now, remotely, and childishly thought there was nothing worse waiting for her in those streets. The theater crowd, respectable older couples who remembered their children or young couples just beginning to dream took kindly to her, treating her like a waif, caring for her for a day, an hour, giving her money or kind words. The theater frenzy, in the wings and backstage, loved her all the more. She was base, quiet, and, when threatened, beautiful. She did what was asked of her, buying cigarettes for women mimicking Kate Shoshina's airs and tolerating their lovers' wandering eyes and hands, handing off makeup and perfume and trying not to choke. They insulted her, naturally enough, but their tongues softened.

Soon her presence, though not acknowledged, was something to be pitied, even spoiled. Within a month, a crewman on the curtain followed her backstage. Mona, the up-and-coming headliner, had set him on it, "Have fun with it, kid," She told her, when Nadine looked over her shoulder, "God knows you could use it." She gave her a sisterly push. Nadine was trapped. The crewman was young and unmarried, with greasy hair and uneven, necessary strength. He looked interested, but more expectant. He grabbed her hand, careless but not vulgar, wanting to get away from the other women. She knew a vague moment of calm when he took her behind the lights, behind the curtain.

"No one'll find us?" She asked him. He was bewildered, uncomfortable, already hiking up her dress.

"Huh?"

"Nothing." But she was afraid she'd cry. She covered her mouth and he, face over her shoulder against the flimsy wall, noticed nothing.

"I can usually tell." Mona was saying, offhand, to the woman curling her hair, "But her, I don't know. What d'you think?"

The woman shrugged, put the wax into Mona's hair to set the waves. It was when she came offstage, and found the girl against the wall, head on her drawn-up knees, pressed deep as if she were sleeping, that she explained the crewman had had grey eyes. And Mona had her answer.

***

We know a little too well what happened in the autumn of 1929. But the basic definitions and reaches of stability did not change very dramatically. Whose lives had been stable in old ways and luxury before the 20's, they took their revenge. Whose lives had been swept up the momentary, electric thrills promised by the decade, they took their fall.

It was lucky that Mae retained from her parents a deep, unexplainable hoarding tendency. Her mother, generations ago, had been Irish, and she had French from her father. Call it cultural adaptation to misfortune, if you will, but it came with a profound mistrust of the stock market, indeed of investments of any kind. Thus, she and her husband had little, if anything, to lose the day the whole nation seemed to cave in on itself. At the first, blunt strike, they swayed, stunned, and carried on.

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Secondary A/N: Jackie has grey eyes. You know, in case you care. Please review…