Declan Gallagher

At twenty-four Declan put a man in the hospital for what he did to his sister and served four years. Prison taught him silence, patience, and that books were the only safe place left. Now he works high steel on commercial builds in Chicago, walks beams forty stories up with a union card and a parole officer. He lives alone in a top-floor walk-up in Bridgeport, keeps his head down, and has tea at his mother's kitchen table every Sunday. What he will not say: he got through those years on library books and started writing, journals and fragments he keeps under the mattress, and he is terrified that anyone who learns what he did will see the violence first and the man never.