A/N: TW: A canonical character death.

Richard unfolded the letter once more and began reading again. He could hear Clara in every word he read, like she was standing behind him, whispering in his ear. Clara's pain and anger were there in every word she had written, but so were her confusion and even her love for him. She still loved him.

Since he found the letter tucked in his door frame, he had read it a hundred times, and still didn't know what to do. The idea of Clara hurting made him feel like he couldn't breathe. However, nothing was different. In fact, things were worse. How could he approach her when things were so fragile?

Two days before was the only time Richard had allowed himself to be truly angry with Jimmy. Waxey Gordon had failed to kill the butcher. Jimmy had dispatched Mickey Doyle to finally, finally settle the debt he owed the Manny Horowitz, butcher. Richard had tried to explain to Jimmy that with men like the butcher, it was as much a debt of honor as it was a debt of money and that Jimmy needed to go in person to make amends with the man. Jimmy had blown Richard off, dismissing his concern.

Jimmy's behavior at the warehouse pushed Richard to the edge when Jimmy threw a tantrum as Jimmy realized that it was Nucky who was drowning Atlantic City in cheap, top-shelf Irish whiskey. Richard's hand worked furiously as he thought about the Irishman who had assisted Nucky in the ploy. He should have killed the man that day at the casino. It would have weakened Nucky, it would have prevented the Irish whiskey gambit, and it would have meant the man wouldn't have come to take Clara away that awful afternoon.

Jimmy's tantrum (Richard couldn't think of another word, although it made him feel like his mother to use it) over not being able to sell the liquor they had bought from George Remus had caused Richard to walk away. Jimmy had utterly lost it in front of Capone, Lansky, and Luciano.

The alcohol and the men that it was worth trying to kill Nucky over. The alcohol and men it was worth hurting Clara over.

In front of Luciano. Richard closed his eyes, trying to forget the image of Luciano's body pressing against Clara, Clara's lipstick smudged across the corner of Luciano's mouth, Clara asking Luciano to get her away from Jimmy and from him.

More than the kiss, it was the fact Clara trusted Luciano when she needed help that felt like a knife in his side.

Luciano's smirks and comments about Clara made Richard dream of planting a knife repeatedly into the man's body.

The ringing telephone made Richard jump. He reached for it hesitantly, still getting used to its intrusion into his life. Jimmy had wanted him to get one for months, but it was when Clara started staying with him that he acquiesced. He wanted to have a way to reach her, and it seemed safer for Clara to have a way to call for help if needed.

"Hello," he rasped out.

"You need to come to Jimmy's house immediately," a woman's voice said in his ear.

"Mrs. Darmody? Mmm. Why," Richard tried to respond.

"Now," she said, and he heard the click of the phone in his ear.

Richard's mouth was dryer than usual as he sped to Jimmy and Angela's, and his hands trembled so badly he had to purposefully try to steady them so the car would steer straight.

Mrs. Darmody stood smoking outside when he pulled up to the house. "It took you long enough. Angela and her friend are dead upstairs. Where is Jimmy?"

Richard stepped back. He felt like the air had just been punched out of his body.

"Mmm. Angel-"

"Is dead," Gillian snapped. "I know you aren't a whole man, but you need to pay attention. Where. Is. Jimmy?"

Richard would never be able to clearly remember the events of the morning. Somehow he managed to tell Mrs. Darmody where Jimmy was staying in Princeton, and then she sent him upstairs to see if he knew the woman Angela was with.

It wasn't as if he had never seen a dead body before. His grandmother was the first body Richard ever saw, back when he was still just a boy. What he remembered most was how small she looked lying in bed with the blanket pulled up to her chin. Nothing at all like the sturdy farm woman who baked him apple cakes and still built her own fires. He had seen sixty-one since he was personally responsible for, and countless others besides. The trenches with bodies piled like broken toys abandoned by careless children, the field hospitals where men, boys, died next to him and sometimes lay there for hours before anyone had time to remove them.

That one hospital, with the nice nurse from Yorkshire whose voice stayed with him although he had never seen her face clearly because of the gauze around his head, the one from the hospital he dreamed about later, who he heard quietly raging about the senseless of a nineteen-year-old dying from a head injury as she ordered someone to take the body away.

Richard took a deep breath and tried to think like a soldier when he opened the door to Jimmy and Angela's room, the one place in the beach house where he had never been.

Angela looked young and so fragile. He had never noticed her small her bones were. She was wearing one of those silk and lace one-piece things Clara wore to bed while she stayed with him. Did Angela and Clara shop together, he wondered wildly, buying pretty silky things and eating lunch and bribing Tommy with ice cream so they could talk about art and books and Jimmy?

The young woman under Angela was naked, and Richard didn't recognize her. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. She had been shot first, Richard decided, and then Angela. The other girl must have been standing, but Angela had been kneeling when she died, judging from the blood spray.

Angela knew she was going to die, Richard thought, and the idea of Angela terrified in her last moments made him want to be sick. Angela was so kind, Angela was a good mother, a good friend, a good person who never hurt anyone. But she died afraid.

Whoever shot her was a professional. There were closer range shots through both women's foreheads. A small-caliber handgun, Richard decided. A tall man.

The butcher.

The shower dripped from the bathroom. Jimmy had complained about it, Richard remembered. The faucet had to be turned a certain way or it leaked. So the woman must have been in the shower, and Angela asleep in her bed.

Asleep in her bed, when a monster came and destroyed her.

He heard sirens and went back downstairs, trying to make sense of everything that had happened. Gillian Darmody talked, and talked, and talked while Richard thought. He stood in the window and watched Angela's body be taken out on a covered stretcher. It was only a little over six months ago he had stood on a truck and helped Jimmy and Angela move their belongings into their new home. Clara and Angela had stood on stools and hung the white drapes in the sunroom that were now blowing in the midmorning breeze. He had been so jealous of Jimmy that day, Jimmy, who had a son, a beautiful wife, a house, and a sister for whom he could still feel love.

And now Jimmy's wife was dead, and his home was an abattoir, and his sister turned against him.

After everyone left, something made him need to go upstairs again. It was as if with every moment there was less of Angela in the house, even though he could see her purse sitting on a kitchen chair and the flowers she bought the day before carefully arranged in a vase on the table. He couldn't bear for Angela's sweet spirit to dissipate from her home so quickly. He mumbled excuse me to Mrs. Darmody and went back upstairs, where he had to steel himself to walk back into the bedroom.

All that was left was a dark stain on the floor, and blood splatters on the wallpaper. Richard knelt and reverently reached out to the stain, feeling the viscous fluid between his fingers. Blood. Blood, like he'd had on his hands so many times. Blood, blood that had turned Angela Darmody's pretty bedroom into a scene of horror.

He knew what he had to do. Angela was neat. She couldn't bear disarray. It was one of the things he liked about her because he felt the same. Something out of place made him want to twist things between his fingers.

Mrs. Darmody was on the phone, trying to call Jimmy again, he thought. He carefully retrieved Angela's cleaning supplies from the service porch. It meant he was removing the last of her physical presence from her home, but he knew Angela would want her house set back to rights as soon as possible.

He wasn't sure how long he washed the walls or scrubbed the floors until the evidence of the last moments of Angela's life were carefully removed so that her son or husband would never accidentally see them. He walked into their bathroom. A bar of Clara's special orange soap sat in the soap dish. He remembered using her bar to make sure there was no blood left on his hands before he touched her the night he and Jimmy scalped Parkhurst.

Clara, he thought.

Clara.

****

The knit of the blue sailor-style dress Clara wore was so delicate as to feel like she was wearing tissue instead of cloth, but the heat and humidity was already so oppressive the dress clung as heavily as wool to the silk step-in she wore beneath it. She sat next to Eddie in the front seat so that her father could sit with Margaret and the children in the back, Emily in Margaret's lap, but her steel braced little legs settled into Nucky's lap as they drove away from the hospital. The polio hadn't spread to Emily's lungs.

Clara decided she wouldn't complain about the heat while poor Emily was encased in metal.

"If you are going to drive the Rolls, perhaps I should give you new lessons," Eddie said quietly.

"Let's all hope I never have to drive it again," Clara said lightly. "Did I damage it terribly?"

"It's only a vehicle," Eddie allowed. "It can be fixed."

Unlike so much else, Clara thought.

Arriving home, Clara sat her purse and hat on the table by the stairs and let her father and Margaret settle Emily into the drawing-room without her interference.

"Miss, a telegram arrived for you," Katy told her as she put her things down.

Clara ripped it open hopefully.

COME AT ONCE. ALWAYS WANTED MY OWN ARTIST COLONY. EXPECT TWO BEST SELLERS AND ONE ARTISTIC MASTERPIECE AS PAYMENT. MARTHA LEVITZ.

Meeting Rose Grenville, she thought, was one of the most fortunate occurrences of her life. Rose had saved her, Rose's mother had helped put her back together when Clara believed she had been irrecoverably broken back in 1918, and now Rose's grandmother was going to help her make sure Angela and Tommy weren't damaged by this war.

As she sat down to eat lunch with her father and his new family, she smiled at him. "You know, you weren't entirely wrong to send me to Foxcroft."

"I wish you had realized that back in 1914," Nucky said sardonically, wondering why his daughter brought up that subject seven years later.

Clara had always considered Margaret's homes chaotic, but that afternoon was exceptionally hectic. Her father had set up his office in the morning room. Bill Fallon, her father's new attorney, came to consult about her father's criminal case while Owen Sleater helped Margaret carry Emily upstairs for a nap.

"Can we play checkers?" Teddy asked her.

"Sure," Clara responded. Teddy was hardly her favorite child, but she had started to understand the boy better over the last weeks. Clara almost felt bad about leaving him when Margaret was clearly not going to have enough time for him, and her father was so distracted. She'd play checkers with Teddy, she decided, and then she'd go see Angela, go to the train station to buy four tickets to Newport, and send a response telegram to Mrs. Levitz with their arrival information.

There was a knock at the door. Clara heard Katy answer it.

"You can not be here," Owen said loudly, his voice intermingling with the sound of his feet running toward the stairs.

The commotion made Clara walk into the foyer. She gasped when she saw Richard with his hat in his hands by the front door, where Katy was staring at him.

"Richard," she said questioningly, not quite believing he was standing in Margaret's house.

"Clara," he said, and his voice made a chill go down her spine.

She stepped towards him, effectively cutting Sleater off on the stairs. "What are you doing here?"

"Miss Thompson, get back," Sleater ordered.

Clara looked over her shoulder. "Don't be ridiculous, he's not here to hurt us."

Richard was looking down and the to the right while his hands were rapidly cupping and uncupping the cap in his hands.

"I'm. Mmm. Leaving," Richard said, looking Clara in the eye.

"I don't understand," Clara began, her heart pounding in her chest and her hands tightly clutching her skirt, out of fear she would reach for him if she didn't.

"I want," he started hesitantly.

"What the hell are you doing here," Nucky bellowed from the doorway to the morning room.

"I want you. I need you," Richard continued, trying to ignore everyone but Clara, who was staring at him like she was trying not to cry.

"To come. With me."

Clara heard the click after every word and knew in a flash what this was costing him.

"What is going on down here," Margaret called from upstairs. "Emily is trying to sleep!" Margaret stopped when she saw Mr. Harrow staring so nakedly at Clara like he was baring his soul in her foyer while Owen tried to get around Clara, Nucky stared at them from the doorway to the morning room, and Teddy stood unnoticed in the drawing-room.

"Richard, I..."

"Mmm. I love. You, Clara. I need you. To come. With me."

Clara could see the fear in his eye, but she was rooted where she stood until he reached his left hand out towards her. She took a shaky breath, bit her lip, and nodded as she crossed the foyer and put her right hand in his.

Richard looked down at Clara's hand in his for a moment and then turned quickly, determined to get them away from the house.

"Let go of my daughter," Nucky ordered from the door.

"Father, I'm leaving," Clara said quietly.

"Harrow, let go of Miss Thompson," Owen ordered.

Margaret watched the scene unfolding and knew without a doubt that at least Mr. Harrow and Owen were armed. She did not want a shootout in her foyer, with Teddy watching from the next room. Clara's words from the dinner back in early spring came back to her, 'the moment he asks,' Clara had said, 'I'm his.'

He had asked.

"Enoch, let her go," Margaret said.

Nucky looked up at Margaret in disbelief.

Someone pressed something into Clara's left hand. Clara looked up, and Katy was pressing her hat and purse into her hand. Katy smiled at her and Clara tried to smile back.

I'm going to leave with Richard, Clara thought, and I don't want to leave violence in our wake.

"I'm leaving with Richard, Father," Clara said, the emotion evident in her voice. "Please, please just let me leave."

Bill Fallon had watched the entire drama play out from the morning room. He wasn't sure what, exactly, was happening, but anyone with eyes could see that Thompson's daughter was in love with the strange man she was clinging to, and the whole situation was about to boil over.

"Nucky, she's an adult and you don't need any distractions or problems. Let her leave," the attorney said quietly.

Nucky nodded slowly, anger apparent in every line in his face, and stepped away from the door. Richard pulled Clara so that she was in front of him and propelled them both through the front door.

Once they were outside he tried to talk. "Mmm. Clara,"

Clara squeezed his hand. "Get us back to your place, then we'll talk."

Nucky watched his daughter cling to the masked man, Jimmy's fucking point man, until Harrow got her into a Ford, and they drove away.

Clara drove away. With his enemy's soldier. Clara, who never expressed one fucking feeling towards Darcy Blaine, but had tears running down her face when Harrow said he loved her.

Who the hell did Richard Harrow think he was to, to love Nucky Thompson's daughter?

Nucky turned to look at everyone standing around the foyer. "Would someone like to explain to me why the hell my daughter just left with Richard fucking Harrow?"

Katy looked down at her feet. Owen and Margaret caught each other's eyes and looked away. No one stated the obvious.

"Clara loves the Tin Man," Teddy said from the drawing-room. Every head swiveled to look at him.

"What?" Nucky yelled.

Teddy swallowed, suddenly sorry he had said anything, but still wanting to answer the man he called Daddy.

"Clara's always loved the Tin Man."