“So, for the money?”

Martin looks around the bar like something has scurried into the place. “What did you think.”

“You just want—? Why would you do this for the money?”

“That,” Martin says, “is a question only rich people ask. Because I don’t have any. We can’t all just crash in Mommy’s little mansion.”

Padgett clenches her hands so she will not say, You know this?

“I did my research after the ninth time you changed the subject,” Martin tells her. “Your family owns fucking Bottle Grove.”

“She’s on the board.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“I’m sorry she was a bitch at the wedding, but that is not remotely, on the largest map, anywhere near the same thing as owning—”

“Close enough,” Martin says, gesturing around the half-empty business.

“No,” Padgett says, “enough’s enough. Yes. I’m those Bottles. From those Padgetts. You can pedigree me up to the first people to fuck up this whole area, probably. But I have nothing to offer. I’m locked out of the money. That’s how they do it, rich people, if you must know. I get a little bit every month, just enough for not doing anything, really. So there’s nothing I can do in my whole goddamn life.”

At this, Martin can’t help rolling his eyes. “You could get a job.”

“I don’t,” Padgett says, “want a job.”

He can’t roll his eyes twice in ten seconds, and besides, he can admit that yes, she has a point. “Look,” he says, “I got lucky a little, a little while back. From nowhere, from a five-star review Stanford’s ex-boyfriend wrote and posted, they call me up about the speakeasy. Do you know what we charged them, the Vic and his new venture vultures, to hang out with call girls until he deigns to show up for a five-minute pep speech?”

“Call girls, I knew it.”

“I just thought you could land him. You could.”

Padgett grabs at the bottle. “I’m not a goddamn call girl.”

Martin swigs and hands it over. “I know! That’s why it could work.”

“Let me think,” she says, and takes her sip. “Well.”

“Well?”

“There’s a safe.”

“What?”

“It’s behind this still life he has on the wall in his study. He thinks I don’t know. One day we were drinking brandy in there and, he won’t remember, he took a key out of this big jeweled book, large like a Bible but hollow inside. You know the kind. And when he was asleep, I crept so quiet to find the key and slip the painting down from the wall. And when I got it open—I’m upset the way you’re looking at me, that you sort of believe all this.”

Martin’s flush looks flushier in the jukebox lights. “I do not,” he says.

“We’re not in the golden age of caper heists.”