He nods again but then thinks better of that and hugs her, right on schedule. “Oh, honey.”

“I never told you,” she says. “I never told anyone,” and decides to fool herself, not just him, that she was too drunk to remember that time she told a weird guy in a bar in the afternoon. In fact, maybe it did not happen, maybe she made that up, just a foggy whiskey dream, waking up on, what was it, a table, in a basement room with curtains but no windows.

“Ssh,” he says. “You poor thing.”

“Yes, I am,” she says. “I took a walk and got scared and thought about the horse—”

“Ssh.”

“I don’t want Nicky going to that school.”

“Who’s Nicky?”

“Our baby maybe.”

His body tenses a little against her, like they’ll discuss that later, when she remembers her last name is Nickels. “Ssh. You know what I think? You know what scares me?”

“That I spent like four months drinking in a bar while you worked late?” she does not say. This rises up in her every so often, not just in her but surely, she thinks, in women all over town. Countless husbands’ risings in tech have left educated, capable women in confusing shade, and then they get pregnant. But she does not say anything.

“My wife scares me,” Ben says, “wandering the streets at night. It makes me wake up and think like a horror movie.”

“But I can’t sleep.”

“Wake me up, if you can’t sleep.”

“But that’s the opposite,” she tells him. “Then you’ll be cranky at work. And what are we going to do—”

“Have sex,” Ben says.

“Right!” she says. “Yes! Breed! Thank you!”

They both laugh and kiss, both honey-breathed and happy to be embracing rather than worrying about the roof of a Japanese school. They would do it on the floor but he never likes to, he always leads her, no matter how naked, to the white expanse of the bed, pulls back the cover so they have the whole empty field to play on. So they go there, and the ghost of the fox, too, moves around the bungalow, on the outside, from the shrubbery outside the living room to a twitchy tree, its forked trunk long and high enough for him to crawl along it and press his flickering face against the bedroom window.

•

Her breath when she kisses me.

Laying around afterwards.

Stop thinking about it.

More late shifts alone? Ask Stanford.

Pistachio infusion?

Amaro and mescal—

Do. Not. Call. Padgett.

Stanford moves his hand in front of Martin’s list like he’s washing a window. Martin blinks out of it. “You,” Stanford says, “are coming, right now, to a rolling stop at the line past which a bartender cannot drink. And Martin, that’s a generous leash.”