The Vic nods. The music’s still going, the thick beer like a sweater on her tongue. She looks back at the empty car seat, and then at the father of the baby, taking a turnoff no one ever takes, down a street where every restaurant, every business, looks worn-out and suspicious. She cannot have another life, but maybe, tilting more of the bottle into her sour mouth with a chain-link alley everywhere out the windows, there’s another way to live. City Hall has boosted the audio on the buses designed for the visually impaired, and Padgett hears it all over town: Doors are opening. The Vic might take her someplace—this is in fact what he is already doing—someplace less pointless and helpless than, every day, where she lives now. Look at them, in the sideview mirror if you tilt it right. They’re a couple. They’re heading somewhere. Boy would her mother love it, another transfusion of money into the family, no need to liquidate the Bottle name, the Padgett home. Would she love it? His eyes in the sunglasses are cavernous, something a bear might sleep in. And the bear, she guesses, is her.

They stop.

“Here?” Padgett asks. “What’s here?”

“You couldn’t trace this back to me with an army of actuaries. Drink up. Liquid courage.”

Liquid never feels courageous to Padgett. It’s too easily procured. The bottle’s almost done and she’s not braver, just more at odds. The Vic has opened a gate in a fence, the sort of gate that looks permanently locked, rusty forever in a field of blank cement and barbed wire. The buildings, windowless and warehousy, stretch up way over Padgett’s buzzy head. She has no idea where they are, any of these buildings, or the man, famous and sunglassed, who is punching into a pad of numbered buttons to make a steel door slide badly up, or her. Why did Martin let her go, the night of the party, up the spiral stairs and home with this mogul? The barman has not answered anything or showed up on her screen. She misses him drying glasses at the bar and hunching over his list, the one for the party reading

limes

cheap ginger ale for extras

music setup

Shandra at Hallowed

and did it really say

Padgett + The Vic

with a box around it and an arrow, or is that something she dreamed up? Is this a plan? Inside it is dark, and this wealthy man is beckoning. A plan so twisty, a scheme so thorny it must be made of pricks.

“Come on in.”

“Vic, what is this?” She can hear herself slurring.