She stands up and there it is, plain in front of her, the two of them and how desperate they are. It’s a privileged and lofty peninsula here, where they gad about town. But that craft out on the horizon, bobbing happy and calm—that’s the boat they missed. Catch it, she thinks fiercely. Catch it now. “It’s a plan now. Isn’t it?”

“It is,” the barman agrees, and in this way they are troth. She heads gracelessly out of the bar, into a night all speckly with the rain over. It’s her turn to almost cry, and crying she beckons an onscreen car. The driver seems to get it, and turns down music on a system that, she notices blurrily, belongs to the man she’s calling.

“Hi.”

“It’s Padgett.”

“I know, Padgett. How did it go?”

She told him the truth, about Martin and where she was going. It seemed like the easiest way to cover it up. “It was upsetting, actually,” she says.

“Did you let him down easy?”

“Well, it wasn’t easy to let him down.”

“What did you tell him?”

“How do I know? Half the time I wasn’t listening.”

“You sound drunk.”

“Well,” she says, looking through the window. The raindrops’ mosaic spatters constellations on the wild nothing off the side of the road. “That’s due, I would say, to drunkenness.”

The Vic sighs into her ear, through a phone he gifted and set up for her. She’s undoubtedly a dot on his screen, tagged and moving, another reason not to lie to him. “I wish you would do less of that.”

“Yes,” she says, nodding slowly, largely, watching the moon keeping pace with her eyes.

“I’m getting serious about you.”

There is no single thing in the world she can think to say.

“I want you to get serious about me too.”

Her situation, she thinks, has not improved, in terms of knowing how to reply to him.

“I’m glad you’re not seeing him anymore. I mean, who is he, anyway, besides a cocktail slinger?”

“He’s a schemer,” she says, with difficulty.

“Good riddance, then.”

“OK.”

She hears the rustly wait through the phone, the loud pauses of our times. He probably hears the wheels spinning her through puddles.

“What are you thinking?” he says finally.

Time for the truth again. “That I look ugly when I cry.”

“Then I guess I’d better keep you happy. Stay up, OK? Stay up at home for me. Stop drinking, there’s restoration water and a baguette.”

“OK.”

“Don’t sneak the Polish vodka anymore.”

“OK.”

“That is literally a twelve-hundred-dollar bottle.”

But you got it for free, Padgett suspects, but, “OK.”

“See you later, then.”

“OK.”

“I love you,” he says, for the first time.