Martin gives up and smiles and roams the place tucking away empties and bringing them back like a stumbly honeybee. Bottle Grove is filling up, a few packs of entitled people to whose money he and Stanford are entitled. It won’t be a bad night, moneywise, although he’d feel better if more people were ordering artisanal and complicated, instead of a lot of beer bottles with the labels peeled off as they talk, like eucalyptus bark. The men nursing them are smiley and should either shave or hole up for awhile until the beards work.

“Can I get this out of the way?” the barman says to them.

“This and this,” says the beardier one. “It was on the floor. Looks important to somebody. What’s a Padgett?”

Inscrutable to one, crucial to another, like every other scrap in life. It’s an old list of Martin’s. He can see Padgett’s name right above Gin, so many substances he’s too into. He crumples it into his pocket, and tells them thanks and nudges them into two doubles of a whiskey Martin identifies as good for sipping after beer. It’s not a lie. Like a mime, he points to Stanford and points to the bottle and points to two glasses, twice, and Stanford nods like, that’s more like it.

Martin slides into a chair opposite the woman who started the night screaming. She’s mostly restored now, restroomed clean with an empty toddy glass in front of her. She stares at him seated and takes a hopeful last sip that’s not more than three drops. She keeps staring until he puts his coffee cup down and then she keeps staring.

“I thought you asked if you could ask me a question,” she says, each word drifting in space.

He shakes his head. “Just making sure. You were rough out there when you came in.”

“You helped me,” she says, and moves the wet bangs from her eyes a little until he recognizes her, it took a while without the movie star getup, as the woman screaming at the vicar, the forest, the fight, the car crash. “Thank you.”

“You’re from the wedding. What happened?”

She blinks. “Reynard.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I don’t remember your name.”

“Martin.”

“Nina.”

“OK, right. So, tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Screaming.”

She reaches a little and in one shaky flourish drinks the rest of his coffee, smacking her lips like a kid. “I was mugged.”

“Mugged.”

“Don’t call the police.”

“I assure you they haven’t been called. But, if you’ve been mugged.”

“It’s not something I want to describe to authorities.”

Drunker, he decides, than one hot toddy, although his own judgment is full of rum. He just points to a ripple at her feet, like a loyal cat, an anchor of wet weight. “Good thing they didn’t take your purse, those muggers.”