“Hey there, boyo! What’s going on with you? You planning on moving in or something? Planning on helping me pay the rent?”

“No way am I paying the rent on this shithole.”

“Shithole, huh? Well it’s a shithole you seem to spend a whole lot of time in, don’t you think?”

“Guess I do. The way I see it, though, the only space I’m taking up is this stool here, and I already pay you more than what it’s worth with the money I spend on your booze. Would you say that’s probably so?”

“Might be. Might not be, too.”

“So maybe we just call it even. What do you say?”

“Fine, Weston. That’s just fine. Want the usual?”

“Sure, I do,” Weston answered through a tired smile, easing himself onto the bar stool as if he were a much older man than what he was in reality. He felt like a much older man than what he was in reality, felt himself creaking and cracking, felt pain in his knees and in his back the way he heard the cops on the verge of retirement complaining about every day at the precinct. Most of all, he felt it in his head. His head was the place where everything felt the most unraveled. It was the place where his fear lived, the place where his little boy anxieties had taken root again and turned into the monsters he’d always known they would be.

It had been two weeks since the seventh anniversary of his wife’s death. Two weeks since the anniversary of Brianna’s car accident, the accident that had robbed him of his young wife and unborn child. He had been little more than a child then himself, a man so recently a boy that the tragedy he was made to suffer had been almost too much for him to take. It had been almost enough to break him, and although he hadn’t allowed that to happen, he could always feel the fissures that had been created and that would not heal. Over the years, he’d managed to create a sort of emotional spackling for himself, a hardening that made those fissures feel less dangerous, less damaging. It also kept him sort of apart from the rest of the world, but he had a difficult time thinking of that as a bad thing. It kept him safe, kept him feeling free of any danger outside of the danger that came from the job. Something about this year, though, something about this anniversary, it was different, and for Weston Daniels, different wasn’t a good thing. It wasn’t a good thing at all.

“You want the bottle set out like before?”

“Nah, that’s alright, Frankie. Just keep an eye out, okay? If you see me looking in your direction, chances are I’ll be needing something else.”

“A little refresher, right?”

“Sure, we could call it that. A little refresher.”

Frankie nodded at him and walked back down towards his customary seat at the end of the bar, but not before giving him a sad, pitying look that made Weston want to throw his drink in the old family friend’s face. He didn’t want his pity, and he didn’t want his sorrow either. He didn’t want those things from anyone, not from a single, solitary soul walking around on this God-forsaken planet. It wasn’t as if he was self-involved enough to believe that he was the only person on the planet ever to suffer. He wasn’t even the only person on the planet to suffer this sort of loss. He didn’t need want the pity of those around him because it made him feel pathetic and because it made him feel weak—and neither of those were things he could easily tolerate. He didn’t want those things from Frankie because they made him think of what it would have been like to have his parents around and able to grieve with him. If he allowed himself to travel down that road, he might find himself turned well and truly insane. He did want that bottle though. That he wanted very much. Frankie had offered it and he’d meant that offer as a kindness, but for Weston it was actually more like torture. He had never been a man that took to the bottle with any kind of frequency. He’d seen that in an uncle of his. He’d seen the way excessive drinking had destroyed him completely and eventually robbed him of his life, and he had made a choice when he was young that he would never be that sort of man when he was grown. He’d been telling himself daily that this would be the day when he didn’t walk through the doors of Frankie’s bar, and every time he’d said it, part of him had believed it. But only part of him. There was another part of him, a part far more insidious, that already knew. It was as if his actions were ordained, as if his hands pushed against that old, battered metal door and his feet trudged across the sticky linoleum floor of their very own volition. Every day he told himself that he would go nowhere near the bars, and sometimes he even managed to keep that promise to himself. Most days, though, he found himself on his little stool, drinking his whiskey and hating himself for it. Sometimes even hating the whole world.

“Sorry to interrupt, Weston.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“Come on, boy,” Frankie answered in a hurt voice, a hurt that looked genuine enough to make Weston feel like a complete piece of shit for talking to him like that in the first place. He didn’t know why he did things like that, why he was nasty to people he liked and flippant as if he had all of the friends in the world. He took another swallow of his drink, winced, and wiped one hand across his mouth in a gesture that had become almost compulsory for him. It was a recent compulsion, but over the last two weeks, he’d been doing it more and more. It was like no matter what he did, he could never get himself clean; no matter what he did, he could never wipe away all of the whiskey he’d been drinking.

“Jesus, I’m sorry, Frankie. I don’t know what makes me talk that way.”

“I do. It’s your grief talking, but you don’t gotta be that way. What I mean to say is, we’ve all got our burdens, our griefs. Part of what we gotta do is learn how to carry on with ‘em.”

“I know that.”

“Sure, you do, kid. I know. Just a bad time for you, that’s all.”

“Thanks, Frankie. Appreciate that. Now…wanna tell me what you didn’t want to interrupt me over?”

“Right! I just had a question for ya.”

“Go ahead and ask it.”

“That woman down at the end of the bar. You ever seen her before? The pretty little blonde girl. She don’t look like the kind of girl to hang around this neighborhood, but almost all of my clientele are from the neighborhood.”

“And you don’t want any outsiders? Is that it?”

“Naw, come on now. Nothing like that.”

“Do you think there’s something questionable about her? Think she’s on the take? Think she’s a working woman?”

“Jesus, Weston! The places your mind goes!”

“Hey, Frankie,” Weston answered with a small laugh, the first he could remember uttering in more than a little while. “I’m not trying to be morbid or anything. I’m just wondering if you think there’s a problem.”

“What kind of a problem?”

“Well, I don’t know. You’re the one who was asking me about the girl, right? Must’ve been a reason. That’s all I mean. That kind of problem. Whatever kind of problem that would’ve made you ask about her in the first place.”

“Ah, Christ, you know me, kid. I’m a sucker for a pretty crying girl. I just wanted to figure out a way to help her, you know? And something tells me she wouldn’t be too thrilled to have an old fat fuck like me bothering her while she cries into her glass of wine.”

“And you think something about me would make it better?”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a look in the mirror, but a pretty young girl would be a lot happier to be approached by a guy like you than by a guy like me. Besides, maybe you’ll be able to help her or something. You know, with whatever it is that’s got her so down in the dumps.”

“It’s probably about a guy. It’s always about a guy, isn’t it?”

Frankie laughed, and Weston asked for more specific instructions on where exactly the woman in question was located. Frankie pointed at a blonde down at the very end of the bar, hunched over her drink so far that it was impossible to see her face.

Weston gave his old buddy a little nod and started down towards her, trying his best to ignore the nagging voice of reprimand speaking up in the back of his head and doing a pretty piss-poor job of it. He hated that voice. He would have done whatever he could to get rid of it and to do so for good. He didn’t know where it was coming from for one thing, which made him fear it, which in turn made him loathe it. Weston was nothing anyone could come close to identifying as emotional, and yet the way he’d just talked about this woman he didn’t even know was making him feel like a straight-up piece of shit. He didn’t even know her, that was true, and yet he’d made light of whatever pain it was she was having. He’d written her off before he’d ever even taken the time to see what it was that was bothering her, and what did that make him if not an asshole? He’d told Frankie he would go and see what the trouble was, and now, all he wanted to do was run back to his drink, down it, and disappear into the old, tacky wood walls. He’d felt like he’d betrayed somebody, like he’d failed to do his duty before he’d even attempted it. Still, he wasn’t a man who turned back when he had any option to move forward, and so he continued to the crying blonde and sat on the empty stool beside her.

“Anyone sitting here?”

No answer. He still couldn’t see the girl’s face, but there was something about the shape of her that seemed to be familiar. Her shoulders were hunched over, making her look impossibly small, almost as small as a child, and by the way her shoulders were shaking, he knew that she was crying. Weston was more than capable of telling the difference between a person faking a good cry and crying for real. He’d seen enough of both over the years to be able to see almost immediately which one it was. This was real, the kind of real where she didn’t want the people around her to know she was crying to begin with. There was nothing about it that was for show, which made it all the more heartbreaking to see. That was the precise word that went through his mind while he looked at her. Even for a man who had seen and suffered as much as he had, looking at another person as broken as he was, struck him as heartbreaking and nothing less. It made him feel an instant protective instinct over her that he hadn’t felt in a very long time. He could remember the last time he’d felt such an instant need to protect a woman, but that was a place he simply could not go. If he allowed his mind to go there, it would destroy him utterly.

“Ma’am? Would you rather I sit somewhere else? I’m not trying to crowd you. I just saw you sitting here, and it looked like maybe you could use some company. Looks like you might be having a rough night?”

“I’m fine, I’m just—”

The girl’s head finally lifted and turned in his direction. When it did so, Weston felt his heart stop in his chest. This was no stranger, no random girl in a bar crying over a romance gone wrong. He knew this girl because he’d been inside of her apartment. Two weeks ago, two and a half, maybe. This girl had been standing in her living room and trying to make him and Vick understand that her dead cat was more than the result of a pissed off ex.

For his part, Weston hadn’t really known what to make of it. He’d had a bad feeling, that was true enough, but it had been so close to the anniversary of Brianna's death that he didn’t believe he could trust anything that came from his own head or heart. Vick, on the other hand, had been totally sure of the exact opposite. He’d hated Clara as soon as he’d laid eyes on her. All it took was one look once they got into the inside of her apartment, and Weston had seen that hate written all over his face. When he’d asked him about it later, Vick had said that he knew her type and that she had to be lying about something. He was sure that she was covering something up and that it was probably something that would make it clear that everything could be traced back to her fault. It was something that had weighed on him some after the fact, but in a city like New York, there wasn’t much time to dwell on things, not even things like a slaughtered cat of a seemingly innocent girl.

“Oh my God. It’s...I know you, right? Are you really him?”

“One of the detectives from your apartment a couple of weeks back. Weston. That’s true. How strange.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, I guess. Just wouldn’t have expected to see you here. Not in a place like this.”

“What’s wrong with a place like this?”

“Nothing,” Weston said quickly, feeling like a broken record. “Nothing’s wrong with it. I’ve just never seen you here before.”

“Is this a place you’ve been a lot?”

Weston could feel his own fists clenching at his sides. He knew that they were his fists, they were attached to his body, after all, but they didn’t really feel like they were a part of him. Nothing felt like it was a part of him. He felt like he was floating somewhere over his body, watching himself make a mess of what should have been a relatively simple conversation with this girl. Clara. That was her name, her name was Clara, and something about talking to her was making his thoughts shake loose in his own brain. None of the things he was saying were coming out the way he wanted them to, and he had a suspicion that he was making a bit of an ass out of himself. That urge to just get up and walk away and pretend none of this had ever happened came over him again, so strong that he grabbed onto the edge of the bar to keep from himself in place. He signaled down to Frankie, which wasn’t hard because the old man had been watching the whole exchange as it went down, and he asked the man for a drink before he was even all the way in front of him. He waited until he had the drink in hand before he spoke again and took a healthy sip to get his wits back about him. He took that sip to get himself in check, and then he tried again.

“Sure. Yes, I guess you could say I come here a lot. Depends on the time of year.”

“The time of year, huh? That’s an odd thing to say about frequenting a bar.”

“It might not be as odd as you think. Bet you would find a lot of similar answers if you talked to the other people in here. In any bar, really. People like to come to places to forget and those tend to be times that come around every year.”

“I think I understand.”

Weston looked at her, looked at her closely in that way he had that gave him a kind of reading of a person’s soul, and he saw that she wasn’t lying. It was in the eyes. That was the part that Vick never seemed to understand, never seemed to see. It was in the eyes that a person showed the kind of pain she’d gone through, and that was the one place it couldn’t be done away with entirely.

“On that note, Clara, what brings you here? This doesn’t seem like your area of town.”

“Oh really? And why is that?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it ain’t exactly the nicest part of town.”

“It’s a good part of town,” Clara insisted, her eye lashes still damp, but the stream of tears done for now. “I like this part of town. I grew up around here.”

“You did?” Weston asked loudly, definitely louder than he had intended but genuinely surprised by this news. “No shit?”

“That’s right,” she laughed, her face momentarily lighting up in a way that made her look beautiful. “No shit.”

“Sorry, don’t mean to be crude, it’s just that I grew up around here, too. Just a couple of blocks away, actually. Frankie there, he’s the owner. He was friends with my parents before they died. Friends from high school, if you can believe it. It’s one of the reasons I like coming here when things aren’t so hot. It’s like having a little piece of family with me.”

Oh, but Weston could feel Frankie watching him now. Even if he hadn’t felt it before, this was impossible to ignore. The way Frankie was staring now had all of the subtlety of getting hit in the face with a bat, and Weston had a pretty good feeling he understood why. For a man who claimed to be so decrepit, Frankie was in possession of surprisingly good hearing, which meant he had probably caught at least part of the little monologue he’d just unloaded on Clara. It was the kind of thing plenty of people talked about when finding an open-minded companion in a bar and wouldn’t have seemed like a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that Frankie knew Weston, knew him well. Because of this, he knew that Weston wasn’t the type to talk about himself this way, and therefore the things he was telling Clara right now were far from ordinary. Weston almost couldn’t blame Frankie for his blatant staring. He himself couldn’t understand why he was telling Clara all of these details about himself, private details that he’d never even told Vick, who was arguably the best friend he had at this juncture of his life if you didn’t count Frankie. It was like his jaw had come unhinged and left him completely incapable of keeping his words to himself. The only thing he could think of to put a stop to it was to ask her something, anything about herself that would take the heat off of him.

“So your turn, then.”

“My turn?” she said with another gentle smile, as she turned her body more fully to him, a movement that told the calculating part of his brain that she was feeling more open and comfortable with him now. “My turn for what?”

“To tell me what part of the neighborhood you grew up in. Mine was one of those little white ones, the ones all in a row, all look the same? Where were you? Any chance I’d know it?”

“I don’t know,” she answered thoughtfully, some of that melancholy returning to her voice, “you might. I grew up at Saint Anne’s.”

“What, the church? Did you grow up a nun or something? Decide to break out at some point?”

“No, not exactly. I grew up in their orphanage.”

Weston felt like he’d been punched in the face. If you wanted to feel like a total asshole, the best way to do it was to make a crack about a girl’s place of upbringing before finding out that where she’d actually grown up was in an orphanage. He took another large sip of his drink and wiped his hand across his mouth, feeling jittery and a little bit sick. He couldn’t get himself on solid ground with this girl no matter which way he tried to play it, and he’d come over to talk to her in order to check out that she was okay! He was pretty sure he was doing the opposite of that, which was completely out of character for him. It was so out of character that he had no idea what the hell he was supposed to do with himself. It was something that must have showed on his face, too, because Clara took her free hand and placed it on top of one of his own, the one that was still holding onto the bar in order to keep himself rooted to the ground.

“Please, Weston, I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable. It isn’t something that I’m ashamed of or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“No, of course not. There’s no reason you should be.”

“It wasn’t a bad life, actually. Lonely, maybe, but not bad. I mean, if it had been, I wouldn’t want to come back to the neighborhood when I’m having a bad time, right? I seriously doubt I would. It wasn’t a normal home, but it was still mine, and I’m okay with that.”

“What is it that’s been troubling you, anyhow? What was it that made you feel like you needed to be close to home?”

She hesitated then, and Weston wondered if maybe he’d overstepped his boundaries. Normally he was sure footed in the way that he dealt with people, making his decisions largely based off of instinct and nothing else. With this girl, however, he didn’t seem to be able to operate with his usual understated confidence. With this girl, every time he opened his mouth he was immediately worried that he would have done better to just keep it shut. Maybe this hadn’t been something that would fall into his jurisdiction, after all. Maybe it was nothing that would or should involve a cop. Maybe she really was upset because of fight, a breakup with a boyfriend, or a terrible row with a best friend she’d known for years. There were a million different reasons for a pretty girl like her to be crying on a bar stool on her own, and very few of them required the aid of a cop.

“I don’t want to bother you,” she answered him finally, the hesitation in her voice bordering on panic. “I’m sure it’s just my imagination running away with me. Your partner seemed to think my troubles were just my imagination running away with me. That along with some guy I must have pissed off awfully badly. You know, for him to have done what he did to Bo that way.”

“Yeah, Vick can be kind of harsh.”

“Are you saying you don’t agree with him?”

“I’m saying that I don’t know. I don’t know what happened, but I do know that you look upset, and so whatever’s going on is real, at least in some capacity. Why don’t you tell me what it is? Maybe I can help.”

And so she did. After one more pause, a pause during which he could see her struggling to decide whether or not it was wise for her to choose to trust him, she opened up and began to speak. She not only told him about the email she’d received, she pulled up her phone and showed him, too, and after he’d read it he could see what she was so worked up about. Following the text she’d gotten and then that mess with the cat, there was really no wonder she was upset. He saw that, saw that the distress in her face was genuine, and then he did something he never, ever did. It was a move plenty of cops made, all of the time, in order to get a pretty, vulnerable young thing to spend some time with them, but Weston had never been that guy. First it was because of Brianna, and then it was because it just wasn’t who he was as a man. It hadn’t been, and it still wasn’t. He could feel settled in himself over that fact, at least. When Weston handed Clara Blake his card, a card on which he had first jotted down his cell number, he wasn’t doing it to flirt. He wasn’t trying to pick her up. He had done it because she was afraid, genuinely afraid, and it was his job to protect people who were in exactly that sort of position.

It wasn’t long after then that the two of them parted their ways, her paying her tab and saying she needed to walk to clear her head some, and him staying for another drink before paying his own tab and making his way home. When he’d given her the card, he thought he’d feel something funny about it. He’d thought he would feel strange, or guilty, maybe angry at himself for paying any kind of attention to another female after the loss of Brianna. The thing was, he didn’t. He didn’t feel any of those things. It was true that he’d given her his number because he knew she was scared and because something in his gut told him that there was more to this whole thing than just a girl with an overactive imagination and an ex with an ax to grind. That was all true, but it didn’t negate the fact that he also found her to be beautiful. He hadn’t thought that about any woman since Brianna was taken from him, not even the women that every man on the planet were supposed to think were so hot it was almost impossible to look at them.

There was something about Clara, though, something he couldn’t put his finger on but also that he couldn’t ignore. He was attracted to her, and the idea of someday spending more time with her wasn’t exactly something he would throw away. He walked home and thought about how this maybe should have made him feel like a piece of shit, and he also thought about how it didn’t make him feel that way at all. He thought about how he didn’t know what the hell that meant, and then about how he honestly didn’t give a damn.