Eduardo's eyebrows gained altitude as he gazed at the damaged footwear over the tops of his glasses. None of the bright November sunlight that was painting the rest of the workshop was present in the small windowless room where the two friends stood. But the smell of leather, oil, and tannen was everywhere. In the ashtray on his desk were the remains of an illicit cigar.

If Maria finds that, my damaged boot will be the least of your problems, compadre.

Eduardo's voice pulled her from her thoughts. "How did you manage to do this?"

Barbara blinked, the scent of leather and oil momentarily replaced by cold night air, and the pounding of her own heartbeat.

Chasing human traffickers that tried to kidnap a woman and her daughter. Barbara's mind snapped back to the chase—three men sprinting ahead, her lungs burning as she closed the twenty yard gap. Her breath roared in her ears like a steam engine, her muscles burning with exertion. At twenty miles an hour she was pushing her limit. Her brain had just enough bandwidth to wonder.

Am I going to break my record?

The air was frigid as it entered her lungs, which were already burning from the cold and exertion. Barbara could still taste copper in her mouth.

Must still be bleeding, she thought, serves me right to have my tongue hanging out.

When they reached the alley on the left they did exactly what she expected them to do. The last man of the three glanced back at her before he disappeared around the corner. His bald tattooed head was pouring sweat down his face and shoulders.

He was waiting to ambush her as she turned the corner into the alley. But she'd expected something like that, and planned accordingly. Her leap carried her to the opposite side of the narrow alley. Her left knee bent as her foot contacted the wall. She pushed off immediately, her upper body already beginning to rotate counterclockwise. Her lower body followed quickly as she transferred all her momentum to her right leg. Her foot struck the man on the left side of his head.

"It was a ricochet off of the dumpster," Barbara Gordon explained, "he was aiming at me and missed."

He had missed her multiple times, truth be told. The bearded man had emptied an entire magazine from his CZ P10c semi-automatic handgun by the time she had finally gotten her hands on him; hands, feet, knees, and elbows. His aim, even while standing still, had been complete shit. But Barbara still felt fortunate that the only thing wounded was her footwear. The guy had come off much worse. Whatever excess anger and aggression she still had she'd expended on him.

"Who was shooting at you this time?" Eduardo asked.

She made it a rule never to share too much with the people who knew her secret. The less they knew the better. For everybody's sake.

"Just some random slave trader," Babs replied casually.

Eduardo was still he inspected the injured boot more closely Barbara's mind flashed back to the alley.

The guy with the ponytail had stopped running and turned to fight, sweat dripping down his face. A short section of chain with a weighted end dangled from his grip. Under the dim yellow street lamp, Barbara noted his sharp cheekbones and narrowed eyes—calculating, waiting. He began to swing the weighted chain in a criss cross pattern. He let the chain play out as it swung, extending its reach as he walked slowly towards Babs. His breathing was coming under control but the cold night air was causing him to shiver. If he didn't end it quickly the woman in the protective (and heated) suit could just let him freeze. But Batgirl had no intention of letting the leader of the three get away.

A bat shaped shuriken lept from her left hand, followed almost immediately by another from her right. Neither had been intended to hurt him. Just to throw his timing off. When he raised each of his forearms to protect his face Batgirl pounced. Her rising knee struck his lower jaw. A powerful cross elbow impacted his head. Two down, one to go.

"You take such risks," Eduardo said. His eyes remained on the boot, but his thoughts were on her.

"You know what would have happened to those women if I'd been even five minutes later? Just thinking about it now..."

She didn't finish, but she didn't need to. He knew what drove her.

Given the nature of the footwear Eduardo was inspecting they were not standing in his normal workshop. The owner of Majestic Shoe Services had taken one look at the woman with the paper bag held in her left hand and simply nodded to the small room behind him. They were almost equidistant from Lower Wacker Drive to the north and North Michigan Avenue to the east. But the only sound that penetrated Eduardo's small office was the sound of heavy-duty sewing machines.

"The bullet must have flattened on the dumpster," Eduardo replied as he inspected the custom boot he had made the year before. The boot looked as if a blade had sliced clean through the instep, where the Kevlar-reinforced leather met the sole. The inner liner had saved the tall woman from a foot injury. But the boot would have to be repaired.

There was a note of concern in her voice when she spoke next. Eduardo was still inspecting the damaged boot while shaking his head. "I didn't notice it until later. Can you fix it?"

Her concern was misplaced though. The side-to-side motion of the middle-aged man's head was not due to the condition of the item he was holding.

"You are fortunate it is only your boot that needs tending. What if he had not missed? You are not bulletproof. All it takes is a well-aimed shot, or a lucky one. A gap in your armor. Or those parts of your face that are only protected by God's grace."

It was not the first time the two of them had this conversation. The last time it had been two against one. Eduardo's wife Maria had looked at the injuries to Barbara's face and voiced her opinion in no uncertain terms.

"One day you will push your luck too far, and I will be looking down at you as you lay in your coffin. And it will break my heart," she had said as she wiped her eyes. She was only ten years older than Barbara, but she treated her as if she were a child. Babs thought it was because she was surrounded by Eduardo's four brothers. Barbara was the only female visitor to regularly sit at Maria's dining room table. Two women against five men. From a strictly numbers perspective, the pair should have been outnumbered. But the five men who so closely resembled each other had learned quickly that the two women were a formidable team. Even though four of them had no idea how Barbara Gordon, Batgirl to the less fortunate subset of the Chicago underworld, had come by her frequent injuries.

"She is an avid rock climber," Maria had explained once to the four men in Barbara's absence. Not really a lie. Just that the rocks Miss Gordon most often climbed formed the exterior of the buildings that dotted the Chicago landscape.

"Can you fix it?" she asked again.

"It will be cleaner if I just re-sole the whole boot. And the other one as well. Give me a couple of days. Can you wait that long?"

He was one of the few people who knew her secret. He and Maria arrived in the US in 2010, and his brothers followed in 2012. Barbara had been 15 in the year between when she interrupted a mugging of the pair. That ended with her lying on their couch as Maria treated her injuries. Her silly excuse for a costume a mass of bloody rags soaking in cold water in their bathtub. In the intervening eleven years she had grown seven inches. But she seemed to be frozen in time, at least in Maria's mind. Still the teenager she was that day. All arms and legs and no training or coordination. The couch that had been more than large enough to accommodate the injured girl could no longer encompass the woman who stood almost six feet tall.

"I can wear the old pair if I need to go out before then," she answered. Eduardo didn't need any explanation of what going out meant.

"Come by for dinner next week. You can pick them up then."

Barbara smiled at the man who was almost exactly six inches shorter than her.

"Deal."

It was only a ten-minute walk from Eduardo's shop to lower Michigan Avenue and the location of the original Billy Goat Tavern. Barbara was halfway through that walk, her mouth already anticipating the taste of one of Sam Sianis' cheeseburgers when her iPhone vibrated in her back pocket. It took her a moment to retrieve the device, and only a second longer to see that the text message was from Angie.

Did I leave my blue sweater at the apartment?

It had been six months since that night Barbara had arrived home. Where Angie should have been there was now oppressive silence. Furniture was missing. Artwork from the walls. Bookcases half with large gaps where books and nick nacks should have been. Barbara stood stunned and numb in front of the half empty closet in their bedroom, a lead weight in her stomach as her hands reached into the empty space. She had held her tears and sobs in until Kate answered her phone call. In the days that followed she and Angie, known as Angeline to her art gallery friends, had traded many messages. Several phone calls and emails containing accusations. Demands. Insults. No wonder they'd had no contact the past three and a half months. Also no wonder it took Angie this long to notice her J. Crew roll-neck sweater had not made the clandestine trip from The Wrigleyville Lofts on Dankin Street to her new dwelling. The weather had just begun to turn truly cold, and while Barbara knew that Angie would never be caught dead wearing the oversized garment in public (and never {gasp} to work) she also knew it was one of Angie's favorite things to wear on lazy Sunday mornings during the winter months.

nope. I'd have said.

Since their messy breakup Barbara had avoided North Halsted Street in general, and the Applewood Gallery in particular, like the plague. Not that it was any sort of loss for her. Art galleries had never really been her thing. She had only taken an interest because that was what good girlfriends did - took an interest in the things their significant others were interested in.

Can't find it is all.

Probably because it's in a fucking box labeled sweaters, Barbara thought to herself.

I'll check again.

There was no need for her to check again. And no place to check even if she wanted to. Anything even remotely related to Angeline Burgess had been eliminated with extreme prejudice from their formerly shared apartment. But Barbara didn't want to continue their virtual conversation any longer than was necessary.

thank you. how have you been?

"Oh for fuck sake," Barbara said out loud as she placed the phone back in her pocket without replying.

Barbara had increased the volume on her phone so she could hear Kate's voice over the noise coming from the table next to her. "You think she's trying to get back together?"

Barbara took a sip of her Diet Pepsi before answering. "I don't know, and I don't want to find out. But she hates the cold and she would have started looking for that fucking thing last month if it was just the sweater she was interested in."

They were not sisters, though it was how Barbara Gordon thought of Kate Kane, as an older sister. Ten years separated the two women. Ten years of age. Four inches of height. And their personal collections of traumas. Kate had been instrumental in assisting Barbara through this particular trauma and had no interest in seeing her relive it.

"Don't respond, don't engage. She's put you through enough shit. I don't want you to get hurt again."

Barbara and Angie had been together for three years one month and nine days the evening Barbara had arrived home late to a dark and silent apartment. She had stood in front of the half-empty closet for five minutes before calling Kate.

"I have no intention of responding or engaging. I remember standing there, staring at that empty space. It wasn't just the clothes that were missing. It was a piece of me."

"I can relate. You know that. It's this life we live. It's never been compatible with long-term relationships. You either keep them partially in the dark, and leave them wondering what you're lying about, or you let them in, and they have to live with becoming liars themselves. And the possibility their knowing your secret might place them in danger."

Barbara had never told Angie about that part of her life. It had not stopped Angie from asking. And deep down Barbara felt that part of the reason she had finally left was because she was tired of secrets.

"Can't you just trust that what I am doing is important, even if I can't tell you what it is?" Barbara had asked one late night/early morning as she sat on the floor of their bathroom with an ice pack over her darkening eye.

"Is what you're doing more important than me? Than us?"

Yes, right now - at this moment in time - it is more important than us, Barbara had thought to herself at the time. Three days the local news was wall-to-wall coverage of the capture of four men and the uncovering of a plot to assassinate Indian dissidents living in the United States. It had taken all of Barbara's willpower not to point to the flat-screen television in their living room and say, "that's what I was doing these past weeks. That's the important thing I couldn't talk about."

Both women were silent for a moment. The noise level in Billygoats had not abated. In the background Kate could hear the famous Cheeseburger! No fries! Chips! Each woman mentally inventoried how many pieces of their hearts had been lost along the way. And the former lovers that had taken them as they finally reached their breaking point when the secrecy and lies had become too much to tolerate.

"What did Eduardo say?" Kate asked finally.

"He's going to resole the pair. I should have thought about that earlier. I'll have to drop off the other one. We still on for later?"

They didn't train every day. Some days, those days that followed a night that resulted in injuries that needed rest, were idle days. At least idle in the sense of their night jobs. Both of them still had day jobs that, at least in theory, they were supposed to focus on just like the other working denizens of the city. But Kate's boss was her father, while Barbara's boss was her Uncle Jim. More father than Uncle. A fact that both James and Barbara Gordon would testify to quite readily. It was only because their fathers knew of their dual lives that they were able to operate effectively. Otherwise, they would both be sleep-deprived to the point of collapse.

"Absolutely. Don't forget that Beth and Julia are flying in for Thanksgiving, and they'll be staying with me. Bruce is planning a big dinner."

Barbara smiled at the thought of seeing Kate's twin sister and Alfred's daughter again. Kate had mentioned that Beth was doing much better, and that part of the reason for that was a new guy in her life; and the youngest of the three caped crusaders of the city of Chicago, sometimes called The Windy City, or Gotham, wanted to hear every salacious detail.

"Can't wait," she answered with a prominent smile.