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“Not everyone gets to come and go as they like,” Harvey said, behind him, to a glass, “taking what they want when they want it.”

Owen turned around. Harvey was drying the same glass he’d been drying for ten years, and hadn’t looked up, and didn’t now.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Figure it out,” Harvey said, and put the glass on the shelf and picked up the next one.

Owen stood there. Brody, seven years gone, home two weeks, the whole room turned toward him, the dance floor his to walk out on, Liv’s hand in his. He heard it that way first. He heard the other way about a breath behind, and it was worse, and he stood at the bar with both of them and turned the bottle and drank none of it.

He hadn’t done it for her good, Sunday, against that cottonwood, with his hand up her shirt and then his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t going to lie to himself about that, not tonight, not with Harvey’s line still sitting on the bar in front of him. He’d done it for his word. He had a fair idea his word was the wrong thing to keep, and he was keeping it anyway, and Brody had his hand on the small of her back.

The song ended. Brody walked her back to the booth, put her down at it, went for Remi, who screamed. Owen set the bottle on the bar without finishing it and went out the door.

The lot was gravel, cold, half full of trucks, his at the end of the row. He walked to it, stood beside it, breathed. The band came through the wall a bar late on everything, and above the sign the sky had cleared off to the kind of stars you only got out here when it was cold enough to hurt.

The door opened behind him. He knew her step on gravel by now, and he didn’t turn around.

“Lauren sent me for air,” Olivia said. “She’s got Mason, Remi’s got Brody, Jett’s got anybody. It’s a full house. I’m the air.”

“Go on back in, then.”

“I came for air.” She stopped a truck length off, arms crossed, no coat, and she hadn’t chased him, he could see that, she’d have come out to this lot if he’d been in Midland. “It’s out here. I’ll take it.”

“It’s cold.”

“It’s February. It’s cold in the alley too, and I’ve stood in that for three days with you not saying anything but ‘Chains.’”

“You said ‘Breathing.’ I said ‘Good.’”

“Don’t be funny now. You had all week to be funny.”

“You didn’t want anything said.”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t. I still don’t. And you can quit turning around every time Brody puts a hand on me, because everybody in that room’s about to notice but him.”

“I didn’t turn around.”

“Owen. You turned that bottle so many times Harvey’s going to have to sand the bar.”

He looked at her then. She’d come a step closer, meaning to or not, and the light off the sign caught one side of her face and left the rest.

“He’s a good dancer,” Owen said.

“He is.”

“He always was.”

“Is that what you came out here for? To tell me your cousin can dance?”

“I came out for air.”

“There’s a lot of it,” she said. “Pick a spot.”

He should’ve laughed. Any other night in his life he’d have laughed. He felt it go by and didn’t reach for it, and she saw him not reach, and her chin came up.

“I danced with a man who asked me,” she said. “That’s all that was. He asked and I said yes, because he’s Brody, and he’s kind, and he’s my friend, and I like to dance. You could’ve asked me. You’ve had thirteen years to ask me. You’ve had Saturday nights in this same building, and my mother’s table, and my daddy’s cows in your pens, and a creek.”

“Liv—”