Stanford’s hand is right there where he put it, on the barman. Their blood pulses together, like an underground spring. “OK cap’n,” Stanford says, “I believe you, so now what?”

•

Padgett longs for an Old-Fashioned, fizzy on top with the fruit in a muddled swamp below. She misses Martin, she does. Instead she is way across town, boutiquey and skinny with little dogs, where everywhere is sushi but nobody is Japanese. She wears a sweater that should, from the price of it, be made of hundred-dollar bills, and she is looking over Nina’s shoulder, through the window painted with the name of the place they’re at, a name she can’t remember and can’t read tipsy.

A bottle of white is finished and the waiter, whom they have asked to do this or whom they haven’t, is wiping it dry from the ice bucket and pouring tasters of the new identical bottle into clean glasses, making six pieces of glassware, if you count their untouched waters, for the two of them. Plus wine all day, Padgett thinks, remembering the blur of Kitsune’s little napping face. By evening she will be as tired as a slumber party after-morning. They are, Nina is, talking about boys.

“He was unreliable,” she says, blinking down at the two wines. It’s a chalky white, because of the minerals in the soil of, Padgett looks at the label, Italy. She is unusual among tech girlfriends for snubbing California wineries, which the men are all buying. “Unreliable as in the sentence You didn’t show up, you fucking fuck.”

“And fake, right?” This new bottle, and knowing they will finish it, has tossed Nina’s story into the brambles, and Padgett hopes they are still talking about the guy she is pretty sure they are talking about. “A fake vicar?”

“A fake everything,” she says. “Crashes my car and is gone. And next day …” But then she moves her hand flat across the air, in a weird silence. Whatever she is not saying, she has said it several times. She keeps starting, “Next day,” and then cuts off short, as if pricked by a thorn. She and Padgett have become, Padgett guesses you’d have to say, friends, but the friendship hasn’t made room for much besides laughter and wine, so this story of Nina’s keeps vanishing. “But you,” Nina says now, “you were with the bartender.”

They both howl a little at this hilarious unspeakable thing. It feels worse than nights with the Vic, pretending to have come to her senses and dumped Martin. “Free drinks, at least,” Padgett says weakly.

“They’re free now,” Nina says, tipping more into her glass. “We’re not party girls anymore, Padgett. I mean, bury me for a minute. Bear. With me. I was always at minimum a medium-sized nuisance to my parents.”

“Yes,” Padgett says, thinking of her faraway bedroom, likely still stilled like Pompeii.