“OK, yeah,” Martin says, and puts a hand on a box to steady himself. It falls a little, and Padgett has a quiet desperate relief that this man, the barman she loves sometimes late lonely at night, is drunk too. Maybe that’s all this is. “Yeah,” he says again. “But you might not know.”

“No,” she says, but it just sounds like an echo.

“Don’t say no,” he says, begging, is he, or threatening her. His voice is too tired to tell, but she feels threatened, naked down here.

“Or?” she says, and it sounds like she has a choice. It’s been one she keeps making, marrying the Vic, staying married to him, raising the child. So is this, the same kind of decision. You can follow the consequences like a thrown spool of thread, unraveling back through the dark maze. Or—and she’s drunk now thinking this—you can get out of the room he’s put you in.

If you say yes.

•

What did she say, what words did she decide, to get here? Rachel stands wondering, in a boxy house right where a gridded neighborhood suddenly loses its thread, about herself. Reynard has rented it, for the two-night minimum, and paid via screen. You never know with these places—it could go good or bad—but it’s nice, mostly, furnished down to the towels and a corkscrew. The only things Reynard brought here were a shiraz blend and her, someone else’s wife. Although she wasn’t brought, was she? She stepped in here herself, after walking for weeks. It’s been weeks and weeks, and the decision of whether to cheat on her husband, which she is doing, or about to do, weighs heavily on her. As does Reynard’s hand, giving her wine in a glass that’s not his, but to which, after paying, he is entitled.

“I don’t know about this,” she says.

“Neither do I,” Reynard says, raising his glass. “Never in my life.”

“You’re lying,” Rachel tells him. “You cheated at my wedding.”

“Not on you,” Reynard soothes. “Never on you.” Like the wine, almost garish in her mouth, his line works whether you want it to or not. She is drunk with him, somehow, drunk on the attention he pays her and a want to undress his shabby clothes. For weeks they have just walked and drunk, flasks, beers, disposable cups and bottles, all brought or fetched by a reformed Reynard. They passed them back and forth, just talking. As long as they walked, nothing, Rachel kept promising some invisible listener, could really happen. Could it? It was just a little wilderness, the forest where she was married. Safe there, not even a kiss among the stumps. But today they have come to this new place, Reynard retrieving the key from a box that unlocks for a fee.