Author's Note: This chapter covers events from "Two Boats and a Lifeguard" and "Battle of the Century", but the timeline is slightly different. The dream that starts the chapter is the season two trailer-you'll see where Clara belongs. Enjoy!

Nucky was lost in a familiar dream. It's always the same. He walks out of the Ritz, and people surround him, calling his name, wanting a piece of him. James, that fucking traitor, and Angela sit sipping lemonade. Lucy walks with that Prohie. The aldermen, Mickey, his New York associates all look at him ominously. Who can he trust. Who can he trust. Gillian and the Commodore ride past in a pushcart powered by Eddie. Eli pins a red carnation to his sheriff's uniform, just like his big brother's, Nucky thinks.

The crowd grows ever tighter around him. Chalky White strolls by on the ocean side of the Boardwalk, and then Harrow walks up the beach stairs with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He recoils from the sight of the man and almost overlooks Clara. She's wearing a blue dress, standing to the right of the stairs with her back to the ocean, looking up at the Ritz like she just realized something about the place she's called home since she was eight years old. As the crowd swirls, he loses track of her, his attention taken by Margaret, by Torrio's little troll, by James. He tries to find Clara in the mass of people moving around him. He expects to find her with James, but instead, he sees her standing with Harrow before he loses her again in the crowd's push, and then he's alone looking out at the ocean in the spot she was standing earlier.

Nucky startled awake. The smell of bleach was overwhelming, and his hand felt like it was on fire, like the night his father struck him with the fire poker for eating first. As he emerged from the haze, he saw a woman in a blue skirt and white shirtwaist staring out the window. The fair curls made him think for a moment that his mother was in the room with him. No, of course not, he thought.

"Clara," he said weakly, and she finally turned from the window.

"Father," she said after she sat in the chair next to him. "The doctor just left. He said it's a clean wound, you shouldn't have long term damage. In fact, you are set to go home tomorrow."

"Thank you for coming," he said as he looked at her closely. There was something in her voice he hadn't heard before, he thought, trying to remember the last time he'd seen her. He'd heard the typewriter at odd hours more than he'd actually seen his daughter since their fight on Memorial Day.

"I need to know," she said, her eyes huge and serious. "Tell me who did this."

"James. We were at the Jack Dempsey event, and James walked up to me and said, 'it doesn't make a difference if you're right or wrong. You just have to make a decision.' As soon as he walked away, the gunman ran up."

Clara choked out a cold, bitter laugh. "I see Jimmy's backbone is as strong as ever." She stared into the middle distance. "If it's all right, I'll move into Margaret's. I need to cut ties with the past, and I can't do that at the Ritz. It will just be until I can make concrete plans."

"What sort of plans?"

"Europe. I'll write the Grenvilles and ask to visit for a bit, start my European sojourn in the Yorkshire countryside," Clara braced herself for an argument, but she was beyond caring about her father's objections to what she wished to do with her life. While she waited for him to wake up, while she measured the depth of Richard's betrayal, she'd started to make plans. How could she stay in Atlantic City without Richard, without Jimmy? This was even going to cost her Angela and Tommy, she thought. Luckily, she had more than enough money saved to get to Europe, and it wasn't like she was going to need that money now for houses and hardware stores. From everything she read, the cost of living on the Continent was so low, she'd be fine with the money she made from writing.

"I'd prefer you to stay until the trial is over."

She looked over at him." I thought you took care of that with the Attorney General ."

Nucky closed his eyes. "There have been complications."

Undone by his own cleverness, Clara thought. She cleared her mind and tried to identify the various puzzle pieces at play. "Harding's administration is in trouble," she said, remembering the news articles she'd read all month long. "They've cut you off, taken away your friendly prosecutor?"

He didn't answer her.

"How bad is it?" she asked in a chillingly empty voice.

"I don't know yet."

They sat in silence. Finally, Clara stood up and walked to the door. She paused before she walked out. "I asked-I begged-you to stop. I asked all of you."

He didn't respond. He didn't run his business on the whims of a girl, he thought, even if she was his daughter. Then something bit at his subconscious as the sleepiness from the pain medicine returned. "You didn't ask who the gunman was. Why didn't you ask if James sent Harrow?"

Clara didn't turn around. Because I asked Sleater what time you were shot, she thought. Because at that moment we were twisted into his bedsheets as my fingers were digging into Richard's back as I moaned his name into his ear as his breath was hot and wet on my face as his hand cupped my left breast as he pushed into me as my leg wrapped around his hip as...as he kept me busy and distracted and away from the event where the man I love as a brother sent someone to kill you.

How ironic, she realized. She loved Richard in part for his strong sense of loyalty. She'd just forgotten she wasn't the person to whom he was ultimately loyal.

"Because you're still alive," Clara answered.

Richard sat at the desk, his hands moving back and forth over the material of his pants. A familiar knock sounded on his door. It took him a few moments to get up to answer it.

The look on Richard's face told Jimmy everything he needed to know. Jimmy let out the breath he was holding. He walked into Richard's room. The quilt folded at the end of the bed, the copy of Dorothy Canfield's The Brimming Cup on the bedside table, the small box of hairpins on the desk, they all spoke to the fact that Clara had all but moved in with Richard over the last few weeks.

Richard's mouth was pulling so hard that it took him time to get the first words out, and they were punctuated with throat clicks. "The Irishman. Came. He told. Clara. Nucky had. Been shot." At first, Richard meant to tell Jimmy the rest. The look of betrayal on Clara's face when she realized Jimmy had ordered her father killed, and that Richard knew, but he couldn't.

"You told. Me. You called. Mmm. Off the hit."

Jimmy closed his eyes. He had told Richard that, and he had meant it. He didn't want Nucky to die, not really. But then Ma pointed out how important it was he look like a leader, that he not backtrack in front of Capone, Luciano, and Lanksy.

'And that's why he dies?' he'd asked her.

Except, of course, Nucky didn't die. What a colossal fuck up.

"I couldn't, Rich. I couldn't look weak."

Richard thought of all the things Jimmy did that made him look weak. Not paying the butcher, not making sure Mickey was guarding the warehouse, having his mother around during meetings like they were after-school 4-H club gatherings. He wondered why Jimmy didn't have a problem with those things that made him look weak, which made him look like a boy playing a man's game.

After Jimmy left, Richard started to stand up but couldn't bring himself to move. Clara seemed to have marked every inch of the room. There was nowhere for his eye to land that did not speak of her presence and her absence.

Clara sat at the desk, forcing the words to flow from her fingertips. The book had to be finished, even if Nan and Bert and Flossie and Freddie's adventures felt like sandpaper in her mind. She refused to let any other part of her life be sacrificed up to this feud. She had lost almost everything she cared about in the world. Now she'd even exiled herself from her home, trapped the last few days in this landlocked room at Margaret's instead of peacefully alone in her room by the ocean.

The door opened without a knock, and Clara prepared to chastise Teddy for once more bursting in on her without warning.

Her father stood in the doorway, staring at her. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Fear licked at her, and before she could push the thought away, she prayed that Richard, Jimmy, and Eli were safe.

"My father's dead," Nucky told his daughter.

Clara let out a deep breath. Thank goodness, she thought.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Died of a heart attack at the breakfast table," he replied.

Clara winced. "Oh, those poor kids," she said, thinking of her little cousins. "I'm sorry, Father. His death must be...emotionally complicated for you, and you already have so much going on."

Nucky almost laughed as he sat across from her in the slipper chair in front of the fireplace. Everyone else gave condolences and expected him to grieve, but Clara knew. It was emotionally complicated, and it was an inopportune time.

"You won't mourn him?"

Clara sighed. "He never missed a chance to say something about my mother, did he? What sort of man makes jokes about their mother's death to a child?" It's enough to make me pity you for your childhood, she thought.

"When I die, is that what your child will say to you, how emotionally complicated my death is for you?" Nucky asked.

For a moment, all she could do was look down at her hands. "When you were shot, I cast from my life everyone I deemed responsible. Without question. Without doubt."

Clara looked up, and the pain in her eyes almost took his breath away. He left without saying another word.

When she went down for lunch, Margaret expressed her condolences.

"We weren't close," Clara replied as she tried to eat her lunch. The cold jellied chicken bouillon was at least refreshing in the mounting mid-summer heat, but she couldn't force the stuffed tomato down around the knot in her stomach.

Margaret wanted to ask Clara about all of it, but the girl's defenses were so clearly raised that Margaret let it pass. Margaret had real problems, she thought, between Enoch's legal troubles and Emily's fever. Clara was an adult, she'd have to cope on her own. Instead, she told Clara that Emily was still running a low fever as Clara pretended to eat.

"Still not feeling well?" Clara asked when she walked through the living room after lunch and saw Emily lying on the sofa looking miserable.

"No one has time for me," Emily told her sadly.

Clara smiled. "That's a familiar feeling. Can I help?"

"I want to finish my book, but no one will read to me."

"I can do that."

Emily held her book.

"The Tin Woodman of Oz ," Clara said softly. Of course, out of all the children's books Emily could possibly be reading, it would be this one

"There's one more chapter. The Tin Woodman loves Nimmie Amee, but the Wicked Witch of the East cut off all his parts and replaced it with tin and he went away because he thought he couldn't love with her without a heart."

Clara forced her face still as the child chattered on

"The Tin Woodman met his old head and they talked. Then he meets the Tin Soldier. The Tin Soldier also loved Nimmie Amee, and the Witch cut him up, too. He doesn't have a heart, either, but he doesn't care. Now they are going to Nimmie's house, and who she loves best wins."

Without another word Clara opened the book.

"We may be sure," she read, "that at this moment our friends were all anxious to see the end of the adventure that had caused them so many trials and troubles. Perhaps the Tin Woodman's heart did not beat any faster, because it was made of red velvet and stuffed with sawdust, and the Tin Soldier's heart was made of tin and reposed in his tin bosom without a hint of emotion."

When Clara finally recited 'the end' she stared down at the page, unable to look into Emily's big eyes.

"I thought the Tin Man and the girl were going to live happily ever after," Emily said sadly.

"I as well," Clara responded. She couldn't leave the child sick and heartbroken, so she reframed the ending. "But the Tin Woodman is with his best friend, the Scarecrow, and that's a happy ending of sorts."

"Is that where your Tin Man went? He wanted his best friend instead of you?" Emily asked.

For a moment, she wanted to laugh at the child's summation of the disaster of her life, but she held back. A smile, Clara thought, smile at the child. "Yes. I need to go write, do you need anything?"

It was a few days later when Nucky called Clara into the conservatory. She could tell Margaret already knew the content of the upcoming discussion. The children's maid brought them down in their nightclothes and robes to say goodnight.

"Goodnight, Mama, Goodnight, Daddy," Emily and Teddy said in chorus. Clara startled slightly at the children not calling her father Uncle Nucky.

"Goodnight, kiddos," Nucky responded, and for a moment, Clara was back in the living room of the white clapboard house on Ventor, the one with four bedrooms her mother planned filling with children. Jimmy lived with them because Gillian was on tour with some company or couldn't take care of him or was chasing a man. Why didn't matter to Clara because the times Jimmy lived in the bedroom next to hers were the happiest of her childhood. They must have been six or so, and she could remember her mother bringing them down in their nightclothes to say goodnight to her father, while he sat in his sheriff's uniform writing at the desk. He'd said 'goodnight, kiddos' in the same tone of voice.

Well, after all, she thought, who needed the messy, disastrous adult versions of Jimmy and Clara when the sweet, innocent versions were available in Teddy and Emily? Why cope with the complex needs and desires of Nimmie Amee when the simpler companionship of the Scarecrow was available?

"Tomorrow I'm resigning as County Treasurer, effective immediately. I'm going to meet with the Commodore and James and tell them I'm done with this game. Clara, you'll need to pack up your room at the Ritz. I'll be giving up the eighth floor at the end of July. Plus, you should know, my money is tied up in a land deal and I just ended my income stream. We will all need to watch our spending."

Clara nodded. Her father was giving up the war, now. Jimmy had won. Her life was in tatters, but Jimmy had won.

"I can support myself," Clara said, and didn't miss her father's barely suppressed eye roll.

"You should also know that Owen Sleater and I are leaving for...England tomorrow afternoon."

"I could accompany you to Southampton," Clara proposed.

"No, I told you, I want you here until after my trial," Clara didn't respond, so Nucky pressed on. "Rebecca Spencer called the Ritz and asked you to a dinner and theater party tomorrow night. I told Eddie to accept on your behalf. So you know, Eddie will be taking vacation while Sleater and I are away."

Nucky was starting to miss the Clara who argued, he thought when she sat primly in the chair and didn't say another word.

"You should also be aware there's a new prosecutor, Esther Randolph," he continued.

Clara looked up. "A woman prosecutor?" she asked with something like delight in her voice.

"Don't get excited. If she asks to see you, contact my lawyer."

Clara wanted to argue, tell him she had her own lawyer, but in the end she didn't have the energy. She wished her father a good trip and forced her legs to carry her up the stairs.

The next night Clara dressed in a blue chiffon and bronze satin dinner dress. The skirt, she thought, was almost scandalously short, barely covering the top of her calves. She'd bought the dress for Dorothy Grenville's rehearsal dinner, and it came with a headpiece made up of more bronze flowers.

These people were supposedly her friends, Clara thought when she met up with everyone in the Ritz lobby, yet she barely knew any of them. They certainly didn't know her.

"My grandmother couldn't be happier with Mr. Harrow as a tenant," Rebecca told her as they walked to Babette's. "She said it's the first summer she's really enjoyed Maine because she knows he's watching after the house and taking care of the lawn."

Clara closed her eyes in an attempt to block out the image of Richard carefully cutting Mrs. Siddons's yard while she watched from the door. "That's nice to hear," she managed to say in response.

Rebecca and her husband, Jonathan, were in earnest conversation with Babette while the rest of the party waited in the foyer.

"Change of plans," Jonathan announced. "Babette's is closed for a private party, not that anyone bothered to call and tell us about the change in our reservation. We'll need to walk over to the Blenheim."

As they walked toward the door, something made Clara turn back towards the hostess stand, where Jimmy and Richard stood staring at her.

Since the moment she sat in her father's Buick (the backup car he liked to loan out to Atlantic City residents for funerals) next to Owen Sleater after he came to get her from Richard's, it felt like her heart was overtaken by ice. Somewhere inside her, she knew, was an abyss of agony and anger, but it was more than she could stand. So she let the ice flow through her veins and numb her so she could cope.

The realization that Jimmy and Richard were standing with Babette because it was their party, that the reason no one contacted the Spencers was that Jimmy had only found out hours ago that her father was stopping the war (Clara realized in that instant that her father was a fucking liar and Jimmy was a fucking idiot because the war was far from over) and had just reached out to Babette about throwing his celebration slammed into her frozen reserve. Jimmy and Richard were wearing their everyday suits. They hadn't even taken the time to change into party clothes.

The ice began to melt.

"Rebecca, I need to speak with Jimmy. I'll meet up with you at the Blenheim, don't wait on me, I'll join in on whatever course you're on when I get there."

Rebecca looked like she wanted to say something, but then just nodded and herded the rest of the party out the door. Clara had known Rebecca since they were six; she had never liked her more.

She turned and started walking back towards them. Jimmy was running his tongue across his bottom teeth. Richard looked between the floor and her with a mixture of pain and hope in his eye. For a moment her resolve faltered, and the desire to throw herself in his arms and accept whatever explanation he managed to give flared inside her. She knotted her hands into fists and pushed the feeling away. Not only had Richard's loyalty to Jimmy outweighed what was between them, but he had bedded her while Jimmy sent an assassin after her father. It was a betrayal she could not stomach.

"Mmm, Clara," Richard started to say.

Clara held up her hand and shook her hand. I'll get to you in a minute, she thought. Your betrayal hurt the most but isn't at the heart of this nightmare.

"Congratulations," she said to Jimmy in a cold voice.

"Clara," Jimmy said, recognizing the tone in her voice.