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“I’m sure.”

“All right.” He looked agonized in his impatience. “I’ll go in there and find one. You stay here.”

Bridget felt the first tendril of shame as she buttoned her pants, the second as she fastened her bra and closed her shirt. She sat down on the grass. She looked up at the sky to a moon that was barely a sliver. She felt tears running down her face.

What am I doing?

Travis came back. He recognized the change in her mood. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not.” Beer told the truth.

She wrapped her arms around her knees. Her body was closed for business.

“You gonna be sick?” he asked.

“No, it’s not that.” She paused and considered. “Yes, I guess I am.” She went around to the back of the bar and retched her guts out. She felt better in one way and worse in another. Nausea abated, reality came back.

She returned to sit on the grass and Travis sat next to her. “Feel better?”

“Not much,” she said. She put her arms around her knees again. She rested her head on them. God, I hate myself.

He patted her hair very sweetly. “You’re a beautiful girl and a fine pool player,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said into her knee.

“You want to go out sometime? Tomorrow?” he asked. “We can take it slow if you like.”

She lifted her head and tried to muster a smile for him. If she was going to have a hideously destructive one-night stand, she had at least picked a nice guy for it.

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” she said.

“Well.” He nodded. “Of course you do. Lucky guy.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think he feels so lucky.”

You have to be someone.

—Bob Marley

“I don’t know if we should go forward with the wedding,” Carmen said to Jones.

She sat at the table in the kitchen of their loft. The kitchen table at home with her mom was pine or cherry wood or something like that, with a million rings and scars on it. It was soft. This table, like everything else in their kitchen, was stainless steel. You could wipe off any marks, but it was hard under her mug, hard and cold under her elbow. Had Jones picked this one? Had she? Probably Annaliese, the designer, had picked it. It turns out I hate this table, Carmen thought.

Jones looked up from the espresso machine. She could tell he was about to press the button, but that he decided it would be unseemly to start up all the boiling, steaming racket when such a serious statement had been laid down.

“Carmen.”

“How can I think about that now? How can I think about flowers and hors d’oeuvres? I can’t.”

“How can you not? Come on. We’ve talked about this. What are you going to think about? Tibby? Are you going to think about her all day long? About your friendship? How many days or weeks in a row are you going to do that? And do you really think it’s helping, at this point?”

The tears were so warm in Carmen’s eyes and so cold by the time they got to her chin and dribbled down her neck or dropped onto the table. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“Move on. Call your agents. Call your manager. Set up some auditions. Look at flowers, visit caterers, buy yourself the most gorgeous, most expensive fucking wedding dress in New York City.”

Carmen studied a teardrop as it sat pertly on the metal surface of the table as if it were the only one. Well, there were more where that came from. She wiped it into a wet stripe with the tip of her finger. “I don’t know if I can.”

Jones knew about grief. You couldn’t say he didn’t. His brother had died at eighteen of a drug overdose when Jones was sixteen. “You can’t let it define you,” he’d said at the time he told her about it, maybe three months after they’d met, and then he’d never spoken of it again. He was either very good at grieving or very bad, and Carmen wasn’t sure which.

“Do you think that sitting here in your sweatpants day after day is some kind of tribute to her?”

Carmen shook her head.

“Carmen, I could see it for the first week. Ten days. I get it. But you’re not helping anybody here.”

Carmen shook her head again.

“I’m not saying you try to forget about it.