“At least let me take you back,” I say.

Stuck outside, the Little Lord shouts something. I can’t quite make it out, and I don’t care to.

“He’s not driving,” she says, her eyes lowered, her voice a whisper. “He brought the driver tonight.”

“It’s not the driving, it’s him,” I say, stepping a few inches closer to her despite knowing I shouldn’t.

There’s people sitting all around, drinking in leather chairs and wooden barstools, and I know they’re a fucking nosy lot, trying to hang onto every word we say to each other. Drama like this isn’t precisely common in Shelton.

“Don’t leave with Alistair,” I say, and I’m begging her. I don’t mean to beg but I am. “He’s not the right— I don’t think he’s—”

I turn away from her, run one hand over my face, still fucking unable to say what I want to her.

“Please don’t,” I finish lamely.

Frankie presses her lips together, her hands in her pockets, and looks away. Her jaw clenches and a single tear falls down her cheek, dripping a path over her freckles.

I wipe it away with a knuckle on my good hand without thinking about it.

“Sorry,” she whispers. “I’m pretty fucking angry right now.”

“Françoise!” Alistair shouts from outside.

“I should go,” she whispers again. “I promise he’s not dangerous, he’s just being really unpleasant right now.”

I want to reach out, take her cheek in my hand, make her look at me. Instead I ball it into a fist.

“Just let me do this one thing,” I plead, voice still low though I’m certain the entire pub is listening. “I’ll shut the pub down right now, take you back. He smashed a glass and tried to hit you. Please.”

Part of me knows I can’t save her from everything. That even if I take her back to the manor, she’ll be answerable there. That even if he doesn’t hit her — and deep down, I know he’s not likely to — he can make her life miserable in other ways.

And I know that her showing up in an ancient Vauxhall Astra driven by the man her fiancé already hates won’t make life more pleasant for her.

“Liam, I swear I’ll be fine,” she murmurs.

Her eyes crawl over my face, a swirl of embers inside me. Alistair calls her name again, all the drinkers in the pub studiously ignoring this scene.

“I don’t have to take you back there,” I say, hoping I don’t sound nearly as desperate as I feel. “I’ll take you to a hotel. The train station. An airport. Anywhere, Frankie.”

“I’ll leave without you!” Alistair shouts through the door, like it’s a threat. I wish he would.

Disgust crawls through my veins like smoke, along with the sickly fear that she’ll go back with him anyway.

“He’s too chickenshit to actually try anything,” Frankie says quietly, her eyes still boring into mine. “He’ll say a few nasty things to me, then fall asleep snoring in the car. Besides, I’m pretty sure I can kick his ass.”

I’m pretty sure of that too, but I fucking hate that she’s thought about it. I fucking hate everything about this, that she’s here and she’s his and there’s nothing I can do for any of it.

“Please don’t,” I say.

“I’m fine.”

“You deserve better,” I say, the words tumbling from my mouth like a sudden avalanche.

I’ve been thinking them for weeks now, but I didn’t mean to say them aloud, to her.

Frankie’s face doesn’t move.

“You do,” I say, unable to stop myself. “He’s a right fucking prick. He wants someone he can show off to his friends. Someone who’ll come when he snaps his fingers and who he doesn’t have to care or think about the rest of the time, and you deserve fucking better than that.”

She turns her head away. Reaches out and pushes the latch back on the door.

“Liam,” she says quietly, not looking at me. “I have to leave.”

I could stop her. I could pick her up, throw her over my shoulder, toss her in my car and kidnap her to wherever I wanted, but then what? Then I’d be the same monster as the Little Lord who’s throwing a temper tantrum outside.

“Promise you’ll be all right,” I say instead.

“Promise,” she says, heaving the heavy wooden door open. I feel fucking sick, nauseous, like there’s a hand trying to pull my spine out through my stomach.

“Nearly thought I’d have to leave you,” Alistair says to her as she steps through the door, and in that second, I’ve never hated anyone more.

“Stop it,” she says, and then the door closes. I stand there, eyes closed against the truth and the heavy weight on my chest, until two car doors close and the car drives away.

When I open them, there’s several pairs of eyes on me, questioning but silent.

“The fuck are you tossers looking at?” I growl, and they all turn back to their drinks.

* * *

I regret it fucking immediately, letting her go like that. I ought to have insisted, I ought to have barred her from leaving, taken her somewhere myself, but I keep returning to that ugly truth that I’d just be forcing her to exchange one cage for another. I should just fucking forget about Frankie, because there’s no version of this that ends well, that finishes with her running from a lordly fiancé who sleeps on a pile of money to a former junkie who she met when he nearly jumped in front of a train.

That night I don’t bother with a glass. I drink from the bottle, one slug and then another. I’m days behind schedule on the Liam Apology Tour, since I can’t exactly call someone and tell them that I’ve turned over a new leaf while I’m legless and nearly blackout, can I?

I just sit at my kitchen table, in the near-dark, staring out a black window, and fucking castigate myself: for letting her leave, for telling her she deserves better, for having fucked up so badly that I work at a pub in the middle of goddamn nowhere in the first place.

You’re nothing to her, I tell myself. You’re an amusement, a side attraction, someone to make her feel better about herself when her fiancé’s a total fucking prick.

Yeah, it doesn’t fucking help.

I take another slug. The bottle’s a quarter gone already, the hazy nothingness sliding back like an old friend who I don’t call often enough. This is where I think about all the things I ought to have done, because they start with letting Frankie go but I can trace them all the way back to Yorkshire, age seventeen, when I shouldn’t have let Gavin take his first snort.

No. I shouldn’t have fucking encouraged him to do it. I shouldn’t have fucking been right there behind him, still a child really but already eager for just about any chemical life could throw at me.

And Jesus, is heroin a chemical.

I close my eyes, run my hand over the whiskey bottle sitting on the table. I thank God above that I’ve no idea where in Shelton I could find anything stronger, because I know that right now if I could I would. I absolutely fucking would, but that’s the point of this shit town, isn’t it?

All the programs in the world didn’t work, but exiling myself to the ends of the earth did.

I shouldn’t have let her go. I should have stayed with her, taken her myself, anywhere she wanted. I should have at least gotten her phone number, called to make sure she’s all right.

I’ve got regrets like a long, twisting waterslide. Easy to hop on and let them take you, out of control once you’re on. One leads to the next and the next, all the way down to the bottom.

I should have insisted on driving Frankie. I shouldn’t have tried to ruin Gavin’s life. I should have stuck with rehab the first time I tried it.

I shouldn’t have offered Allen his first snort.

I shouldn’t have handed him the needle that killed him.

I take another slug, and another. After enough I stand, stumble fully clothed to bed where I drift in and out of consciousness, half-awake dreams haunted by a bridge and a train and a girl.

She still doesn’t know, I think to myself reflexively every time I come awake again.

She saved me, but I fucked it up again anyway.

* * *

I feel like absolute shit the next morning, but I get on with my life because I’ve got to. Despite one hell of a hangover, when I walk into the pub at ten ’til three I can tell something is off right away just from the look John, the daytime barman, gives me.

That is, he smiles at me. It’s strange and awkward and he’s clearly not used to doing it, so it’s puzzling as fuck. I stand there, in the doorway that leads back out to the alleyway, and wonder why the fuck John is smiling at me. Maybe he’s practicing to ask someone on a date.

Thought he was married, though.

I’m still wondering what’s got into John when the office door open. John looks at me again and smiles a little harder, the smile now beginning to look a little frightening and painful.

“Liam,” calls Shelley, the woman who owns this place. “Need to talk to you.”

She’s got a helmet of gray hair, a face that wouldn’t look out of place on a bulldog if bulldogs wore bright blue eyeshadow, and a voice that sounds like chains being dragged over gravel thanks to forty-odd years of chain smoking.

Sheila is also an absolute fucking angel. She’s an old friend of Harry’s — neither has ever said how they know each other, exactly, so the story has got to be good — and the only person I could find willing to hire a dissolute addict with no money and no skills who’d just finished his third stint in rehab.

“What is it?” I ask, leaning against a wall.

She jerks her head back into the office.

“In here,” she rasps.

My heart drops, because Sheila’s never needed to talk to me in the office before. When I accidentally dropped a full of bottle of Laphroaig the second week I worked here, she had no problem chewing me out in front of John, the customers, God, and everyone.

It’s about the scene last night. It’s got to be.

“All right,” I say, and follow her into the tiny, messy office.

The desk is stacked with papers. There are cases of liquor stacked up against one wall, and three precarious-looking filing cabinets against the other. There’s no computer, because Sheila doesn’t believe in the things, and the whole room reeks of second-hand smoke.

“Sit,” she croaks.

I sit on one side of the industrial wooden desk, nerves jangling, as I spin through every possibility I can think of.

Someone’s been stealing and she thinks it’s me. No, she wants me to snitch on whoever’s doing it.

The pub’s shutting down. I’m out of a job.

She’s selling the place.

She’s finally got lung cancer and she’s telling me she’s got six months to live.

She’s going to ask if I’ll sign her nephew’s drum kit and turn up at his birthday party.

Admittedly, that last one isn’t terribly dire.

Sheila heaves herself into a steel office chair that groans under her weight, then squeaks when she leans forward. The fluorescent light in the office doesn’t do the deep lines in her face any favors, and she sighs dramatically, her yellowed nails tapping an uneven rhythm on the desk blotter for a few long seconds.

“What is it?” I finally ask, because I can’t stand it anymore.

“Jaysus, woman, get it over with,” Sheila mutters to herself.

Then she straightens, picks up an envelope, and hands it to me, her eyes watching my face.

“Sorry,” she says.

I take it slowly. I don’t want to. Nothing good has ever come from opening an unmarked envelope, but it’s not as if I’ve got a choice. I tear into the thing and pull out two slips of paper.

A paycheck and a termination notice. I stare at it in silence, a fist squeezing my heart in my chest.

“What the fuck?” I finally say. “If I’m doing something wrong you can’t come and fucking speak with me about it?”

“It wasn’t up to me,” she says, looking at her hands. “Liam, I’m—”

“Don’t fucking give me that,” I say, my voice rising. “You own the place outright, it’s not as if you’re answerable to a board of supervisors.”

“The Winsteads own the building,” she says, her gravelly voice low.

The Winsteads. Fuck.

“I own the business, but I lease the building itself from them, because they own this block and the next and the next and most of the fucking town, you know,” she says, holding up one hand palm-out to shut me up.

“It was that fucking prick Alistair,” I say, my breath leaving my body in a rush.

“Yeah,” she confirms, sounding defeated. “I don’t know what exactly you did, Liam, but the boy’s in a state.”

I get to my feet and start pacing, though the office is so small I can only get about a step and a half before I turn around.

“I didn’t do anything,” I say. “It’s not a crime to be nice to a girl who comes in for a drink to escape her wretched boyfriend.”

“I heard fiancé,” Shelley says. “That’s not all I heard.”

“I didn’t fucking touch her.”

She laughs humorlessly.

“If that’s your defense it’s a lost cause,” she says. “Everyone fucking knows, Liam.”

“Knows what?” I say, gesturing wildly with the envelope, still in my hand. “Knows that we speak sometimes? Knows that we sometimes converse over beers?”

Sheila just snorts.

“Everyone knows you’re over the moon for the American girl who’s already got a man,” she says. “Look, Liam, I’ve got a friend who runs a bookshop in Dunburne, half an hour away from here, and she’s got an opening for someone to keep the shop during—”

“It’s a fucking lie,” I snarl. “Alistair Winstead’s a dimwit who’s got a prick the size of a birthday candle and the personality of a sickly badger, so of course he’s got to bully anyone who might have the wits to strike up a conversation with a girl he fancies, because otherwise she might be swept off her feet by someone who doesn’t look like an inbred rodent and who can talk about more than counting his money.”

I turn, jerk the door open.

“Liam,” Sheila says. “You’re not wrong about any of that.”

“But let me guess, I’m still fucking fired?”

She doesn’t answer, just looks at me, so I slam the door to the office and walk back through the bar. John’s still there, still trying to smile at me though it’s not going very well.

“Hey, you all right, mate?” he asks.

“Fuck off,” I snarl.

For good measure, I slam the back door, too.