My stomach tightens.
Her voice has the careful flatness of a woman who's rehearsed this sentence in her head a hundred times and is saying it out loud for the first time.
"And when it comes out—" She swallows. Her thumb stops on the rim. "—and itwillcome out. It's going to ruin everything."
I don't speak. Don't fill the silence. Don't offer comfort or advice or the reflexive "I'm sure it'll be okay" that people throw at pain like a blanket over a fire.
I wait.
She looks up. Her eyes meet mine and the desolation in them is so deep I have to brace myself against the bar to stay upright.
This isn't a woman processing bad news. This is a woman watching her life come apart in slow motion and knowing she's the one who set it in motion.
"If you need to talk," I say quietly, my fingers resting on the bar near her glass without touching it, "I'm here."
She stares at me for a long time. Long enough for the jukebox to cycle to the next song. Long enough for a customer to wave at the far end and Tildie to handle it without needing me.
"You're a good person, Saylor." Sarah's voice breaks on my name. She picks up the whiskey, drains it in one pull, sets the glass down, and stands.
She walks out without paying. I don't add it to her tab.
Some debts aren't measured in dollars.
* * *
My phone rings just before ten. It’s Mom.
I step into the back hallway and pick up, and the sound that comes through the speaker makes my blood stop moving.
My mother is crying.
Not the type of crying I've heard from her during the hard conversations about my father.
Not the tired, frustrated tears of a woman dealing with something she can handle.
This is fear. Pure, animal, body-shaking fear.
"Mom." I press my shoulder blades against the wall. "What happened?"
"He was at my office." Her voice comes in fragments, broken apart by breathing so ragged her diaphragm sounds like it's fighting her. "He was waiting in the parking lot when I finished my overtime."
He was at the dentist's office. At her workplace.
Where she goes every day, where the staff knows her name, where she parks in the same spot because routine is how she survives.
He found her routine. Mapped it. Sat in a parking lot and waited for her to walk out alone.
"Did he say something?" My fingers are white around the phone.
"He grabbed my arm." She chokes on the word. "He grabbed my arm, Saylor. He leaned in and he said—he said Dennis wants me to stop being difficult."
Stop being difficult.
The words hit me like a closed fist.
Stop being difficult is the phrase my father used when my mother filed for divorce.
Stop being difficult is what he said to Christine Pelletier in the parking lot before he pulled out a knife.