And, well, it isn’t. Not right this second. She lopes her legs down and kicks at something that rolls badly.

“That’s my barrel.”

“Happy birthday.”

She is, he realizes, guessing or joking, or maybe with the cocaine he’d said something. He tilts the barrel upright. “I am in fact thirty today.”

“Well,” Padgett says, “I bet this is how you planned it.”

“You think?”

“Sure, hitting your new decade in a grimy forest. More fun than a barrel.”

“Too dark to see the grime,” he says.

“Trust me, it’s there. You know what I mean, and you know that it is. I’m lost too.”

“You sound like a bumper sticker. Don’t follow me—”

“It’s a big con, isn’t it?” Her question rattles him in the dark, like an intruder at the door.

“What, life? Not late enough for that conversation.”

“Marriage.” Her sigh is so long he swears it floats out to sea. “You pretend to be a person and meet another one and they’re pretending too. You suit up to be better, kinder, more …” Her hands gesture someplace lost in the dark. “And then you get to pretend together, the two of you. You tell a story. Fooling the world while you fool each other. It’s the whole thing.”

“You sure you’re not maid of honor? This would be such a lovely toast.”

“That guy fiddling with the special music system. She can’t love him like she said, what did she say with the first champagne? Breathlessly.”

“He seems nice.”

“I’m sure. OK. But then, he is also breathless with her?”

“He’s a pudgy guy, probably gets breathless easy.”

She laughs and stops. “It’s a con. They’re tricking each other.”

“They’re in love.”

Padgett is working the spigot. “That’s what I mean.”

“Hey, that vicar?”

“Yeah.”

“Had a blowout with his wife, I mean fiancée.”

“Where?”

“Right in the wooden room we were all in.”

“I think I meant why.”

“Well, this is the thing,” Martin says. “He snuck off and had sex with my associate.”

“Stanford, really? What kind of sex?”

“The kind,” Martin says somewhat patiently, “to which his fiancée strenuously objects.”

“Well.”

“Yes. And they got in a car. And crashed.”

“Is everyone OK?”

“The vicar is gone.”

“Dead.”

“No one knows, due to goneness. They don’t know where he is.”

Padgett snorts at this, finishes the cup again. “I don’t know where I am either.”

“You’re in the weird edge of a sort-of forest. Near my bar, I might add.”

“Oh yeah? What’s it called?”

He tells her and she snorts. “Been open eighteen months. We have a new basement speakeasy space for parties.”

“Speakeasy?”

“Well, it’s legal. But we’re trying to set up a lawbreaking vibe.”

Padgett lolls her head back. The mutter of automobiles cross-fades in her drunken ears. “That’s very sad to me.”