“She had this dog when we lived together. We had it, I guess. It was grandfathered in. Hyacinth. About this big.”

He does not remember, Rachel realizes, that she’s seen this dog. “That’s not big.”

Her husband smiles. “About this small, then. And she used to walk it in Bottle Grove, not very often. Anyway, some big dog attacked her—”

“The dog?”

“The dog, yes. Her dog was attacked by this other dog, and she killed it.”

“The big dog.”

“With a big knife,” Ben says. “She carried it with her.”

“Your ex-girlfriend carried around a big knife? She killed a dog and you still went out with her?”

“Just a few more months,” Ben says. “It really rattled me. But you were so happy to have the wedding here—”

“Darling.”

“—that I just buried it. But yeah, that’s the part that sticks with me too. That it happened, and I stayed.”

“Yeah.”

“But who knows why people stay together, right?”

Rachel almost yanks back her hand, but then offers it again. Ben slaps his own head.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says.

“It was perfect, the way you said it,” she says, and as they walk out of the forest, she feels very safe indeed, to be together in the streets.

Blocks away, the bar’s just opened—literally, the door has just swung open. “Late, but I made it,” Martin says to Padgett, and it is not clear if he is apologizing. Bottle Grove opens at four—it’s ten after, now—and Padgett has been waiting since three something, leaning against the sun-spattered parking meters feeling lonely and addicted. She’s the only one who shows up at four who doesn’t work there, aside from a woman, not old enough to be an old lady, who shows up, lipstick messy, and orders champagne, very cold. A ridiculous request, Padgett thinks, because the champagne is in a fridge, cold as it’s ever going to get. Now that Martin has come she feels she is still waiting, but for what, she can’t decide. “How was your day?”

“Wasteful,” she says, already sitting on the stool.

“Did you—”

“I didn’t do anything.”

He walks toward her, suddenly, at least to her, wearing just one shoe and on the other foot a sock so filthy it might not be black. “It was caught in the escalator,” he says, raising his leg.

“What?”

“I took BART to have coffee with my brother.” BART is what they call the train—Bay Area Rapid Transit, although Padgett can never believe that’s the real name—but this is the first she’s heard about a brother. “On the escalator going home the shoe got caught. I had to move fast so it wasn’t my foot. It ate the whole thing up. They gave me an address to write them, and maybe I’ll get a check.”