She slaps him, hard. She’s had practice, from watching old movies and fighting with old boyfriends. The couple shut up so they can gasp and gape, the most interesting time they’ve had in a bar since who knows. Martin takes it, and, a full twenty seconds later, silent except for verse three of the song, uncorks the bottle for a refill and hands it to her deadpan. She forgets or abandons her fancy glass and swigs it straight, and for a second it looks to everyone, everyone in the world engaged in this, like she’s going to spit it in his face. But instead she swallows it down, then hands back the bottle and puts the glass on the ground and says, “I saw your list.”

“My—?”

“Padgett + The Vic, don’t say you didn’t write it. You handpicked it and set it up. You told me you had plans. That’s what they were. So don’t start with gold-digging.”

“I was just bartending,” Martin says, but he is quiet with it, and Padgett knows at this sinking time that she is right. It was a real list and she really saw it.

They’re quiet for the song’s bridge, a fragile one.

“I have a lot of plans,” Martin says finally, “but not one that has ever spun out the way I thought it up.” He drinks too, from the same bottle, both glasses forgotten along with the other left-behind trash to pick up at closing. “My life,” he says, “what is the word, I just lost it, that they call musicals nobody likes? A flop, so far. Stanford and I are drowning up to our eyeballs.”

“You’re depressed.”

“Well, we’re in a depression. I mean, we pick up customers here and there, and the rent’s not due here and there, you know?”

“Maybe if you didn’t throw them out.”

“That’s one plan. But I thought, you know, of another. And I was right. The Vic, you should have seen when he saw you, went right for you and you kept him laughing. Right? Teams of money men can’t get him to sit still for thirty seconds, and you guys talked for almost two hours before he drove you home.”

“Except it wasn’t home. You set me up. I’m bait.”

“Padgett, I will beg if necessary.”

“Why don’t you tell me just what the plan was.”

“Is. I just thought, you’re a coaxy gal. He’s a titan of industry.”

“Stop.”

“Look, it is just a matter of moving some money, which he is rolling in, to the pocket of somebody else who cannot at present rub together two dimes to make a fire.”

“So you propose—”

“Well, he’s not going to propose, is he? He’s a grieving widower. But there’s money. You know there is. I thought, you pal around with him, the money kind of slides my way.”