Hit and Run

"Refill."

The bartender didn't turn around. He was wiping down the counter at the other end of the bar, ginger beard, arms like a man who had never lost an argument in his life, moving with the unhurried energy of someone who had heard everything and was impressed by none of it.

"Hey." I knocked my empty bottle against the counter. "I said refill."

He turned. Looked at the bottle. Looked at the four others lined up beside it. Looked at me with the specific expression of a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to.

"No," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"You've got five bottles sitting there you haven't paid for. Plus three from last night." He set down his cloth. "I'm not running a charity."

"I'm going to pay." I sat up as straight as the bar stool allowed, which wasn't very. "I just need a small extension."

"How small?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

He pointed at the door.

"I'm not ready to leave."

"You're not ready, but you're going," he said, and turned back to his counter.

I stayed exactly where I was, which I felt made a strong statement.

This was my life now. Cramped shelter during the day, this bar stool at night, the same jeans and sweater I'd had on since God knows when because the shelter's washing machine had broken a week ago and Ms. Edna, who ran the place, had not mentioned fixing it since. I knew I hadn't washed my hair. I knew I probably smelled. The bartender and I had reached an unspoken understanding about it.

I had been Mrs. Tyler Rider. I had a walk-in closet with a lighting system designed by an interior decorator. I had a bathroom with heated floors. I had standing appointments at a salon on Fifth Avenue where the women knew my name and brought me wine without asking.

Now I was bargaining for my sixth bottle of whatever this was with a man who wouldn't even look at me.

The thought arrived the way they all did lately. Swift, blunt, and right to the bone.

"Oh my God, they look so adorable together."

The voice came from the table beside me. Three women, one bottle between them, crowded around a phone screen with the collective excitement of people whose lives were going very well at the moment. I glanced over without meaning to.

Then I looked up at the television mounted behind the bar.

Tyler stood on the steps of Noir — the rooftop restaurant I knew because he had taken me there on our third anniversary, because I had worn a black dress he picked out himself, because he had held my face in both hands that night and told me I was the only home he had ever known.

Lucy was tucked under his arm. Laughing. Diamond ring on her finger catching the light so aggressively it was practically announcing itself. That ring. I knew the weight of it. I knew the exact moment Tyler had slid it onto my finger because my hands had been shaking so badly he had to hold them still.

"She's gorgeous," one of the women at the next table breathed. "And that ring—"

"I don't know," the second one said. "She did steal her best friend's husband. That's a certain kind of woman."

*Yes,* I thought. *Say it louder.*

"Oh please." The first one waved her hand. "You can't steal what someone already threw away. And have you heard about the ex-wife?" Her voice dropped into the register people used when they wanted to sound reluctant but weren't. "Tyler said it himself in that interview. Cheating with multiple men. While he was out there building his company."

My hand tightened around my empty bottle.

"I saw that interview," the third one said, nodding slowly. "She had everything — a rich husband, a beautiful life, and she just—" she shook her head "—some women genuinely don't deserve what they're given."

"A disgrace," the first one agreed. "Honestly, I feel sorry for Tyler. A man like that, carrying all of that alone while she was cheating."

I was standing before I made the decision to stand.

My hand found the first woman's hair with a clarity that the alcohol had not dulled at all. I got a proper grip and I held it and the table went silent in the stunned, electric way things went silent right before they became very loud.

"Say it again," I said. Quietly. The way you said something when you meant it. "I want you to look at me and say it again."

Then everything happened at once.

The woman screamed. Her friends shot to their feet. Someone's wine glass went over. And the arms — those large, inevitable arms — closed around my waist from behind and pulled me. The way you pulled someone back from the edge of something, feet lifting off the floor, the woman's hair slipping from my fingers as the distance between us grew.

"Alright." The bartender's voice was calm. He moved me toward the door the way you moved furniture. "We're done."

"She was talking about me—" I protested.

"That is not the point—" The door swung open and the cold night air hit my face and then the pavement was under my feet and the door was already closing. I spun around.

"I wasn't finished—" I shouted at him. Embarrassment flooding my face.

"Eight bottles." He held up a finger through the glass. "You owe me for eight bottles. Don't come back until you have it." He pulled the blind.

I stood on the pavement, chest heaving, hair wrecked, the city moving around me like I was a stone in a river. A couple across the street walked past without looking. A cab slowed, saw me, and kept going.

"I'll be back tomorrow!" I shouted at the blind. "And those women better be there—"

No response. Just me and the cold and the muffled sound of music still playing inside a bar I was no longer welcome in.

The anger drained out of me slowly, the way it always did, leaving something quieter and heavier in its place. I pressed my hand against my stomach out of habit now, the small automatic thing I had started doing without thinking, and I stood there in the cold outside a bar I couldn't pay for in jeans I'd been wearing for four days, and I thought about that ring on Lucy's finger, and the way Tyler's hand rested on her waist in that exact familiar way, and the rooftop restaurant where he had once held my shaking hands still.

I was moving backwards, my eyes still on the door, when the headlights swung around the corner.

Someone shouted.

I heard the screech of brakes and turned and there was a moment — very brief — where I understood what was happening and could do nothing at all about it. My feet went out from under me. The ground came up hard and fast. The world tilted and then went very still and very dark.

The last thing I saw before the darkness took me was a man's face above me. And my hand, pressed flat against my stomach.

Please, I thought. Not my baby. Please.

Then the darkness won.