They both picture the lawyers opening briefcases in unison, taking out large balls of string and getting to work like spiders.

“Well, there’s your decision,” he says.

Padgett puts down her half-finished drink, and then, what the hell, finishes it. A decision is like a guitar, Padgett thinks. She doesn’t know how to make one.

Martin looks over at her. They met at a wedding, and in every wedding is the makings of another. He takes her hand, keeps looking, and when she finally looks back, she can see herself, and that’s all, in each of his eyes.

“Just,” he says, his mouth slouchy with drink, “just tell me that you still love me.”

“Martin.”

“With your eyes,” he says. “At least. If you can’t say it.”

They have never said they loved each other. They have said they loved Manhattans, and lounging under a cloud of them, on an unmade bed noisy with nearby television. They have said they love the sound of the M Ocean View train on foggy afternoons, all creaky on the dampened tracks, or maybe they didn’t say that, just listened to it from the kitchen floor. To say she still loves him, still, before she said she loves him at all, is chaser first. Yet Martin. Yet his eyes on her, hanging himself on any word she will say. Tell him what?

“As God is my witness,” she says, and although she has the feeling God is nowhere near this empty room, there’s something there. She can hear it, in the dark past the bar’s glow, she can feel it, but if it’s god or man, a creature or a ghost or the line of cocaine she leans over to inhale and seal the deal, she does not, falling into blackout, cannot know.

•

Something happens then, or it happened later, and then she’s half come to. Her arms ache from holding up the little blue chair that she remembers forcing, bumpity bump, under the doorknob to jam it all, against some creature, some animal lost in the howling liquor.

Her room, her old bedroom, is a wreck. Who let her sleep in this wreckaged wreck? The bed has been over, the mattress slabbed up against a shelf and the sheet fitted over just one corner, with a stain in the shape of a stain. But it’s not like she’s been sleeping in it. Padgett is here on the floor, with a little blanket, stitched with baby animals.