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Chapter 1
A man walked into the bar.
He wore a suit and tie, and he was dripping wet.
He looked like the type who didn’t dishevel himself all that often—one of those New York City business types whose polish always made Allie feel aware of her general rumpledness. But this man had lost his polish. She could only see a bit of its faded shine in the way he carried his body, and in the dissatisfied creases at the corners of his mouth.
Frowny mouth aside, he wasn’t a bad-looking man. He was tall, with expensive-seeming close-cropped hair of an indeterminate color. Easy to look at. The kind of man who could be flirted with and bring roses to your cheeks. It had been a while for Allie, but she could still spot second-date material. He was doing that sort of middle-distance halfway squint people adopted when they entered a basement bar and wanted to take a look around without actually meeting anyone’s eyes.
The problem was, Allie wanted him to meet her eyes.
The problem was, additionally, that Mr. Second-Date Material wasn’t here to be her first date. Possibly he was looking for his real first date somewhere in the bar. It didn’t matter. Whoever Ms. First Date was, Allie needed this guy to look at her more than Ms. First Date did.
“Psst!” She rose a bit from her chair in the corner. “Hey!”
He continued his slow survey of the room, taking in the crowded bar, the bartender, the tables along one side. No doubt appreciating the Packers-themed decorations, the televisions tuned to ESPN-2, the signed black-and-white headshots arranged between mirrors behind the tables.
Pulvermacher’s was a cool bar, she’d give him that. But if the dude skimmed his eyes right past her one more time she was going to brain him with a beer stein.
She rose all the way to standing and tried to beckon him without seeming like she was beckoning. “Hey! Wet guy! Over here!”
It was a tricky thing, whisper-shouting. Not a move she’d ever had any reason to master. At the bars back home in Wisconsin, she just shouted.
Tonight, though, she had two excellent reasons not to attract attention—both of them seated at the far end of the bar. Or they had been, and presumably still would be once she managed to maneuver this guy out of the way.
She didn’t want to think what would happen if she lost them.
Don’t think. That was her motto on this particular adventure.
But the wet businessman had materialized in the precise exact wrong spot for her not-thinking plan to keep working for her, and now he’d taken his phone out. He was going to stand there all night. He would never move, and she would die.
A woman laughed. The laugh made it necessary for Allie to see what was going on at the bar.
She didn’t want to. She needed to.
“Hey, guy with the phone?” Allie pitched her voice a little louder this time—a calculated risk.
He looked up, squinting.
“Yes! You. I’m talking to you.”
He swiveled, and she gave him a frantic, low wave.
“Hi. Could you come over here for a sec?”
He did. Just like that.
Sadly, it turned out he was, if anything, more impossible to see through close up than he had been from eight feet away.
“May I help you with something?”
He had an accent—British or Australian, maybe—which made his offer sound extra surreal. Like it was coming from a villain, or maybe a spy. A real spy, instead of a fake spy like her, with her rain-frizzed hair and extra-long midwestern vowels, hiding in the corner of a New York City bar that was trying to be real Wisconsin even though men walking into it with British accents and suits definitely meant this was fake Wisconsin.
Allie made bad decisions when she felt uncomfortable. Her mom taking off right before her thirtieth wedding anniversary had made her super uncomfortable.
Which explained, in a roundabout way, why she was skulking in a trench coat on a Sunday night at the back corner table of Wisconsin-cum-Greenwich Village rather than, say, consulting with her sister, May, or her father, or her best friend Elvira, who had pointed out this bad-decision tendency of Allie’s in the first place.
Not that it was news to her. Bad decisions were just in her. She’d been the tantrum-throwing toddler, the first kindergartener to get suspended for fighting on the playground in the history of her elementary school, the middle-schooler who ran away all the way to Milwaukee and had to be retrieved with the help of police, the college student who hated her French professor so much she stopped going to class and ended up failing and tanking her GPA, and, to top it all off, the bride who canceled her wedding on the day of and cost her parents and her fiancé’s parents and her guests thousands in nonrefundable deposits.
May never even got a detention.
Don’t think about what Elvira would say, she reminded herself. Or May. For sure don’t think about May. Just fix this mess. Whatever it takes.
Fix This Mess had been her motto yesterday afternoon, when she’d figured out her mom was gone and her dad didn’t know where she’d taken off to or when she’d be back.
“It would help me out a lot if you’d let me buy you a drink,” she suggested.
“Why?” Water beaded on the shoulders of his suit jacket. His expression sat somewhere between perplexed and unflappable.
“I feel like we should.”
This brought something like a smile to his lips—not quite there, but almost. “Give me a good reason.”
At the bar, Allie’s mother laughed again. “You did not,” she said with slurred delight. “You did not!” Then a barstool scraped the floor, and she said, “I need to visit the ladies’.”
Shit.
Shit shit shit. Also, shit.
The route to the bathroom would take her mother right past her, which meant her only hope of avoiding detection was the Englishman and/or Australian standing right in front of her. But his body wouldn’t block Allie from her mother’s view—not from all the angles she’d have on Allie’s corner table as she walked by.
He needed to sit.
Allie felt mad—giddy and stupid and off her rocker. But she’d blown past her moment of decision a ways back,
either when she illegally logged into her mom’s credit card account to snoop through her statements or else when Allie blew off her work, lied to her dad, and charged a last-minute plane fare from Milwaukee to Newark to her own credit card.
Either way. She didn’t have room for scruples or sensibility or whatever it was that held ordinary people back. Not anymore. She’d shoved all her chips across the table on a bluff. Her only option was to keep bluffing.
The man wanted one good reason to sit down with her. She briefly considered batting her eyelashes, but past attempts had mostly led to people asking her if she had something in her eye. Instead, she put both hands on the table, leaned forward, and said, with utter honesty, “Because you never know when the person you meet at a bar might turn out to be the most interesting thing to happen to you in all your life.”
It was true, too. Any life could turn on a dime. Hers had. Twice.
