The barkeep’s face still wore a pinched look, but the hard gleam in his eyes had gone away. “Mr. Lafcadio’s tab is high,” he explained, “because there are drinks from the past month on it too. Mr. Lafcadio, he comes in and sometimes he has money and sometimes he doesn’t. I serve him no matter what because he’s been coming in here for years.”

I paid Pat’s tab with the food money for the week, all of it.

The barkeep counted out the money for me, Miss.

You’re right. He could have cheated me, and he could have lied to me about Pat’s comings and goings too.

Cheaters and liars looked away when doing their business is what I’ve learned. He looked me in the eyes. Better still, he looked me in the eyes like I reminded him of someone he knew. So I believed him. If I hadn’t, I would have asked Charlotte to send over Mr. Cleneay and his brothers to settle the sum for me.

There’s more than one way to arrive at the truth, Miss.

I gave the barkeep my promise that I would return the next day with the rest of what Mr. Lafcadio owed him. He then handed over Pat’s belongings, and the crow laughed as I walked out into the midday light.

Pat didn’t even look at his belongings when I placed them by the bedside. He opened his eye for a moment when I’d entered the room, and then he closed it again.

The whole of Pat was a closed eye for days to come.

Then one morning I awoke and he was already dressed, shaved, and hungry for his breakfast. Riffling through his papers and notebooks that had sat unmoved for weeks, he asked whether I had brought everything home.

“What are you looking for, Pat?”

The notebook with the article ideas, he replied, and then he found it lying on top of the pile.

With a cup of tea and four griddle cakes in him, Pat left the house that morning with the notebook in hand. He didn’t say where he was going, and I worried that he was returning to the Enquirer to try to get his job back. Fool’s errand, I would have told him. Another lesson of lesser was that there were no second chances.

But Pat wasn’t a lesser. He was only married to one.

Pat came home that evening with a job, not with the Enquirer but with the Commercial, Miss Caroline’s newspaper of choice. He’d even received his first week’s pay in advance, which he handed over to me. I don’t know if it was all of it, but it was more than ever before. Pat hadn’t asked how I’d made do, but he must have known that there couldn’t have been any fresh meat, milk, eggs, or butter for Bill and me while he was away. “Away” was what he called the weeks that he had remained in bed. I’ve never been away, because no matter what happened—no matter what lessons I’d learned—I would have to be up again before dawn.