The vodka did its job on most nights, plummeting Colleen toward a deep, dreamless and amnesic sleep. But that vodka, it fell down on the job by the time dawn leaked through the small square window across the room. Then Colleen’s mouth felt like it was made of the black ash at the bottom of her dad’s grill. Her head felt like a bowling ball too heavy to lift and her throat was lined with broken, sharp oyster shells. She could have handled all of that, but the remembering did her in every time. She’d awaken, curse the obvious hangover and then pull at the threads of blurry memory in a continuous effort to understand why.

Oh, yes, she’d think. I drank most of Maggie Marlow’s vodka because I’m in Connecticut to forget that my sister and fiancé are in love.

Had they taken advantage of the wedding already in place and walked down the aisle together? Had they eaten her shrimp and grits, drunk her champagne? Said the vows she and Walter had practiced at the rehearsal? Gone on the honeymoon to the wine country of California?

Colleen wanted to know, yet she didn’t want to know. She wanted to call Shane or her parents and ask. But above all—shimmering on top and below and around those questions—was an imperative need to forget.

When two weeks had passed, Maggie urged Colleen to come out with her to the local watering hole. “You have to get out of my house,” she joked with a wink. “Actually, I have to get out of my house and you’re my excuse, so let’s go.”

It was a pretty town, a northeastern version of Watersend, with Tudor style replacing coastal shingle-style homes. The streets’ gaslight lampposts and iron sidewalk benches were reminders of home. And it was a damn Irish pub that Maggie chose, obviously trying to be comforting, bringing Colleen somewhere that felt familiar. But how could Maggie have known that emotional triggers hid on every street corner and inside every lit window? When Colleen walked into the dimly lit bar she felt she were floating, untethered from her life, dizzy. This was a pub, but it wasn’t the Lark. She was Colleen, but she wasn’t engaged to Walter. This was a small town, but it wasn’t Watersend.

Maggie met up with her crowd of friends and Colleen found herself alone at the bar impressing a guy with red hair in a blue suit, with a white hanky in the pocket, with her knowledge of whiskey. “It’s a single malt from one of the last family distilleries in Scotland. The name means ‘Valley of the Deer’ in Gaelic.”