I drive back over the bridge and past the compound and Old Town to a little bar a few blocks south. It’s stood here for decades and used to be a place where Abel, Cohen, and I would drink before we turned twenty-one. The old owner was a friend of our father, and he never bothered to card us. He’s been dead a few years now, and his daughter has run the place ever since. Jennifer is a large white woman who looks like she could crack my head with her bare hands. Her longtime girlfriend, Renée, a petite Black woman with braids, is her exact opposite, as sweet as she is tiny. She’s the one who waves when we walk through the door and into the dim interior. “Go ahead and sit wherever.”

The place is the same superficially as it was the last time I walked through the door. The bar still stretches across most of the wall across from the door and there are a scattering of tables and chairs, mostly empty. But it’s changed. This place used to be a dump, exactly the kind of bar a person would expect to find minors drinking in because they don’t bother to card. Sticky floors, smoke perpetually gathering in clouds against the ceiling, all sorts of unsavory types lingering in the shadows created by not enough light.

It’s still dim in here, still welcoming in that specific way, but it smells faintly of lemon cleaner, and there are actual framed pieces of art on the wall. They’re all stylized drinking glasses and bottles, nice enough to look at, but they don’t try to make this place anything but what it is. A dive bar, if a cleaner and safer one than it used to be.

Even the clientele seems different, though it’s still too early in the day to say for sure. But the few people already here are wearing clothes that suggest they’re stopping by for a drink on their way home from work.

Things really have changed.

I try for a smile at Renée. “Is the back room open?”

She grins. “I knew you looked familiar. Broderick Paine, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s been a while. For you, it’s open.” Renée jerks her thumb at the doorway in the back. “You want me to come back and get your orders, or do you need privacy?”

“Privacy, please. I’ll grab our drinks and take them back myself.”

Her grin widens as she takes in Monroe and Shiloh behind me. “Go on ahead, then.”