"I need to be married by Friday."
The man had sat down two stools away, put a phone face-down on the bar, and said it to nobody at all.
Nora Vance did not look up. "Congratulations."
"It's not that kind of statement."
"They rarely are."
He laughed — once, surprised, like the sound had got out before he'd approved it. She looked then. Dark coat, expensive, worn like an apology. A jaw doing a great deal of work holding his face together. He was not handsome so much as assembled, and someone had clearly spent money on the assembly.
"Adrian," he said.
"That's a lot of information for a stranger."
"You'd be amazed how little anyone does with it."
The bar on Ninth had no name on the door, which was the entire reason she went there.
Three hours earlier a lawyer had slid a folder across a table towards her like it might bite.
Eleven days, he had said. After that the subpoena is public, your name is public, and I can't help you.
Nora had not touched the folder. She had learned, over four months of rooms exactly like that one, that touching things made them yours.
And if I leave?
Then you're a woman who left. He had shrugged, and the shrug was the most honest thing anybody had offered her since March. People do it. Not usually people whose face has been on page six, but they do it.
So: eleven days, one bag, and a bar with no name on the door.
The bartender refilled her glass without being asked, which meant she'd been here too often, which meant this place was already burned. Nora added it to a list that was getting long.
"Friday," she said.
"My father wrote a will with a sense of humour. If I'm not married by my thirty-fifth birthday, the company goes to my brother, who will sell it for parts by Christmas and buy a boat." Adrian turned his glass a quarter-turn on the bar. "Four hundred people work there. My brother has never met any of them."
"So find someone."
"I've found eleven someones. They all wanted to stay married."
Nora set her drink down.
He moved. Not far — one stool, the way a man does when he has decided a conversation is happening and would rather not shout it across a bar — and then he was near enough that she could see the wear on his cuff and smell the cold he had brought in with him, and her whole body reported it, which annoyed her.
It was, she would think later, the exact moment the ground moved — not dramatically, not with any noise, just the small internal click of two impossible problems recognising each other across a bar.
"How long," she said carefully, "would you need her to stay?"
Adrian Cole turned and looked at her properly for the first time.
"A year," he said. "Somewhere nobody's looking."
Say no, Nora thought, with great clarity. Say no now, while this is still a funny thing that happened in a bar.
"Tell me about the house," she said.