Page 66 of Wreckage and Rain

"Saw the angle of his shoulders. Didn't like it."

"Mm." She drinks. "All right then."

She isn't pretending she didn't notice. She isn't making me apologize for noticing her either.

***

She stays until last call. I lock the floor doors and walk her out into the cold.

The wind off the lake gets through her coat. She pulls it tighter.

"Walk you home?"

"I'm two blocks that way."

"Two blocks."

She looks at me. Considers.

"You don't have to."

"I know."

We walk. We don't talk. She stops in front of a door under a buzzer panel for a third-floor walk-up.

"Thank you for tonight."

"Thank you for telling me."

She nods. Goes inside.

I walk back.

***

I lock the floor doors from the inside. Stand in the dim of the empty room. The stage is dark. Glasses on the bar to wash. I don't move.

I haven't thought about Elise in a week.

I think about her now. It sits lighter than it used to.

I think about the woman who just left. The corner stool. How she leans in when the lights come up. The short version she handed me like she'd decided something about me on the walk to the bar.

I go upstairs and lie on top of the covers in the dark. She's married. She's wrecked. She's not mine to want, and I'm not going to make myself one more problem in a life that already has too many.

I tell myself that a few times. I'm awake a long time anyway.

Chapter 16: Served

Summer

The attorney calls at ten in the morning Chicago time.

I am in the walk-up in Wicker Park, in the same kitchen I have eaten cereal in for over a month, with the same cold coffee in the same chipped white mug because the things you take with you aren't always the things you choose to take with you.

"Mrs. Bennet."

"It's Summer."