“Um, someday.” It is something she keeps deciding, like some long hard jog, when every step you could stop and instead walk sweaty and panting to a bar. She has a lifetime to make this choice; she will do it someday and she is doing it now. When he asks if she is serious, what else can she tell him, what else is there to say?

The word is champagne.

“Yes,” Padgett says, and the baby kicks her feet, although lollygaggingly. She is fading fast. The Vic is looking for bubbly in his nearest refrigerator, but Padgett already knows where it is. And she is thinking of another wedding, a family wedding, in a lodge named after the family, hers. She was fourteen, and after a solemn ceremony bedecked with bagpipes, she wandered ignored in Bottle Grove. The man was, she thinks, a friend of her uncle’s. The light was a perfect green, the greenest and most perfect light in her life, and although she can recall—recall or invent—his thick hands on her knees, this is not where she wants to return. Maybe he was a beast, and that was wrong. But what was right, magically and green, was the thrill in her mouth, dancing and locked inside her forever, just moments after he said, “And this, my dear, is vodka and orange juice.”

Oh, the world is where you’re flung, every day’s an unfair gumball machine. She’s here now, in a mansion that’s not hers but to which—it is always the way with mansions—she is beginning to feel entitled. Padgett has the lion’s share of champagne and begins nudging the Vic, who is talking about wineries, seasons, good clear weekends to invite people, with her scratched-up legs, still sore but healing up quick like good little scars. Her fiancé is talking quickly, like he does about tech, quick, she thinks, before she changes her mind. His silly garment comes open a little, at her burrowing feet.

“I love you,” he says, and she kisses him in reply. They rise and put the baby down, and they go into the bedroom and three years pass.

Part Two

Part Two

Chapter Six

CHAPTER 6

A man in his thirties walks into a bar. This isn’t a joke. Half past five on a school day, and it’s quiet in the place like it’s time to turn the record over and play the other side. Bottle Grove is still the name of the establishment, and the name of the man who runs it is still Martin Icke. He pushes the man’s ID card back to him without looking at it. “I’ve seen you in here before,” he says.

“Yes?” The man looks around like he doubts it.

“Think so,” Martin says. “I remember the picture.”