Page 133 of Spiced!

“I looked at all of you,” he said, “and the speech seemed like the wrong thing.”

The room fell quiet in the warmest possible way.

“The bar didn’t make us a family. It was just the magnet that drew us all to the same place,” Finn said. “We made the bar. Everything good about this place came from the people in this room—the numbers, the kitchen, the bar, the Saturday nights.” He looked at Adrian. “The dancing.” He looked at me, briefly, which I hadn’t expected. “The people who found their way here and stayed.” He finally turned to Chase and held his gaze the longest. “And those we ran into who changed our lives forever.”

Chase set his glass down and wiped his eyes.

“To five years.” Finally, Finn raised his glass again. “The hall stands.”

Erik, from the bar, shot to his feet and raised his glass with the contained gravity of a man hearing his own contribution given its proper weight.

“The hall stands,” Erik bellowed.

Then everyone stood and raised their glasses, and a chorus of men called, “The hall stands!”

Mofongo sneezed under the table, which was not a toast but felt like participation.

Everyone broke into laughter at that.

An hour later, somewhere in the comfortable noise of the evening, Skyler looked around the room and frowned.

“Where’s Tyler?” he asked.

Jacks looked around. “He was just—”

“He was here,” Erik said. “Then he was not here.”

“Maybe he went to the bathroom,” Jacks said.

“That was twenty minutes ago,” Peter said, without looking up from whatever Erik had given him to read, because Peter tracked time the way other people tracked weather—automatically and without meaning to.

“Twenty minutes?” Skyler said. “Why does that make me nervous?”

Benji set down his shaker very slowly. “Oh, no.”

“What?” Jacks asked.

“Oh, God no,” Benji said again, which was not an answer but was its own kind of answer.

Then the music changed.

Not gradually.

Not a crossfade.

One moment it was the upbeat pop that had been playing in the background all evening, then there was a beat of silence—a single suspended second in which everyone in the room registered that something had shifted—and then the opening notes of something slow and heavy and unmistakably disco rolled through the bar.

The lights dimmed.

“Oh, shit,” Skyler said.

“Oh, yes,” Benji said, glee wafting off him at the unexpected chaos of the moment.

The spotlight—there was apparently a spotlight, which Benji had installed for the anniversary and which had not been mentioned during any of the planning conversations—clicked on and illuminated the small cleared space in front of the bar.

And Tyler stepped into it.

And he was wearing a trench coat.