Barry glued his eyes to the TV. His hand reflexively reached for the empty beer glass, but he didn’t say anything for a long time. For too long. Curiosity overwhelmed me; the end was coming, and now that I’d started down this path, I had to know.

  “Come on. It’s okay to tell. Your secrets will be safe with me.”

  “Why?” Barry asked. “Because the world’s about to end?”

  “Yes. But also, I’m a bartender. I’m supposed to keep your secrets, but I don’t know any of them, and that bugs me. I’d like to fix that, and there’s no better time than now.”

  Barry snorted. His eyes rolled. But he didn’t start talking.

  Eli Manning got sacked, and the defeat music started playing as the Giants lost another game on their improbable run to the Super Bowl. Barry pumped his fist and ignored me, his other hand clutching the empty glass like a lifeline. He wasn’t going to answer.

  I turned to Anette. She was more of a talker, and she was my best bet at leveraging Barry to tell me what I wanted to know. “What about you? You were a CEO or something, right?”

  “Right.” Anette’s eyes pierced mine for a moment. I couldn’t look away; the dark-haired woman’s gaze was so intense it was captivating. Her eyes were like two pools of gray-and-black water—simultaneously full of emotion and completely, intentionally void of it. Then she sipped her drink. “Listen, kid. You want to know, make it worth my while. That’s how you learn about people. It’s transactional.”

  That made sense. I thought about it. What could I offer Anette at the end of the world? It took me a minute, and she tipped her head at the shelves behind the bar.

  I grabbed a bottle of gin—the real good stuff. The Cornerstone had a few bottles that the owner had collected back before it was a dive bar in the 1970s, and he’d told me that under no circumstances should I ever open it. They were decorative, not for drinking, and our clientèle couldn’t afford it anyway.

  I pulled the bottle out and worked the stopper for a few seconds before it came loose. The glass bottle was so dark it was almost black, and its gold labels somehow managed to be ostentatious and understated at the same time. I poured it into a glass and added some citrus-flavored vermouth. Before she knew it, a martini—possibly the most expensive one I’d ever made—sat in front of her.

  She reached for it reflexively, but I held up a hand. “This one’s going to cost you.”

  “Fine.” Anette stretched, her back and shoulders popping. Then she cleared her throat and started talking.

  -Anette-

  Anette Fitzgerald was on top of the world.

  Literally.

  She’d just finished a breathtaking run down a black diamond somewhere in western Colorado that wove back and forth through the ski lift and glades of trees before ending literally at her back door.

  She’d taken a second-rate tech company that had only hired her because they thought it’d make them more attractive as a merger target for Intel, Nvidia, or one of the other big-shot corporations. In the last eight years, she’d maneuvered it through a dozen hostile takeover attempts, turned it into a mid-sized predator that ate start-ups a few times a year, and earned herself a hefty bonus in the process.

  She had a second home here in Colorado and a third on a beach near Miami. A yacht, a private plane, a loving husband and the societally recommended 1.7 children—rounded up to two and both taken care of by a full-time, live-in nanny.

  Money couldn’t buy happiness, but it sure removed a lot of the stressors that took it away.

  Not all of them, though. The one thing it couldn’t get rid of was a nagging feeling of dread. It was a deserved dread, but even so, after years, it should have gone away. One bad decision—a tough one, but one that had to happen for the company to survive—had led to another, and while most of Anette’s fortune had been self-made, not all of them had been, strictly speaking, legal.

  She’d had help to do it, but no one she trusted had any incentive to turn her in.

  And Anette Fitzgerald knew, even as she took off her boots for a little après-ski beer, that those legal misunderstandings would stay hidden as long as she kept them covered up. There was no way anyone could know about the books she’d cooked or the shell companies she’d used to hide her company’s debts during the first year or two so it looked more solvent than it was. She’d fudged plenty of numbers and outright lied about the company’s outlook.

  And it had paid off.

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  That was all buried in the past, and a beer was waiting for Anette in the ski house’s kitchen.

  So was a man, but not her husband—or the boyfriend her husband knew about and tolerated, either.

  This one wore a dark blue uniform, a badge, and a gun on his belt. He wasn’t alone; two other officers stood near the bedroom door, and the front door hung open to let in both the cold and even more police. And just like that, Anette’s carefully built house of cards collapsed.

  I slid the martini toward Anette. She sipped at it, then smiled sadly. “Thanks, kid.”

  “So, you got arrested. And then what?”

  “Well, the company’s stock tanked overnight. We went from one of the hottest handful of tech companies to the most toxic stock on Wall Street. They fired me two days later—didn’t have to follow the Golden Parachute clause either since it was a firing because of legal issues related to how I handled the company.”

  “That’s it?” Barry asked from his perch by the TV. He paused long enough to shoot a halfhearted glare my way—I got the feeling that if he’d known I was offering bribes, he’d have participated. “What happened to you?”

  “Jail,” Anette said shortly.

  “Yeah, but what kind of jail? We’ve all been in. Right?”

  I shook my head. So did Randal. He cleared his throat and, for the first time, said something. “Momma raised me right.”

  Anette stiffened like he’d smacked her across the face. Then she took a long pull from the martini glass, completely draining it. Her shoulders slumped a little as the booze hit her. “Anyway…”

  Barry snorted. “I bet you went to some Martha-Stewart-ass prison.”

  -Anette-

  Between the fines, the contractual take-backs as the company tried to push her under like a drowning man trying to save himself, and the economic collapse that wiped out her stock market portfolio while she was behind bars, Anette Fitzgerald was screwed.

  That fact hit her within about ten minutes of getting out.

  She’d been in prison—“yes, a ‘Martha Stewart-ass’ one, Barry”—for less than two years.

  In that time, her whole life had changed. She had money. Not enough to never have to worry about it, but enough to start over. And she had relationships. Not her husband or kids—she could have visitation, but he and his new wife had custody, and they’d moved across the country to New York. She'd have to follow if she wanted any kind of relationship with the kids.

  That would burn through most of her savings, cut most of her ties in the San Francisco area, and leave her with…what, exactly?

  The voice on the telephone agreed with her. “Listen, Anette, I’m glad you’re out. But you know I don’t work for free, and I know you don’t have the cash to make me worth your time. If you wanna grab dinner somewhere tomorrow night, I’ll pay. Our business relationship’s over, though.”

  “No, Rog, that won’t be necessary,” Anette said stiffly. “But there must be something you can do for me.”

  Her former financial advisor—and the only person who’d known the full extent of what she’d done for her company before the trial—sighed. He’d dodged the legal mess in part by cooperating with the investigation and in part by having books that were squeaky clean and exhaustive. He’d never once left her hanging, but he’d also made sure he’d never done anything illegal.

  The phone went silent for so long that Anette was pretty sure Roger had hung up on her. Then he sighed again. “Okay, look, Anette. You’ve got, what? Three hundred K if you liquidate what’s left of your portfolio, sell the cars, and dump everything else? That’s not bad, but it won’t be enough for New York City, and you’re heading there, right? How about Jersey instead? East Brunswick or Bridgewater? They’re smaller, and a little more out of the way. Cheaper, too.”

  “Roger…” Anette trailed off. He was right. But she couldn’t admit that. She’d been on top of the world—her picture had been on magazine covers as an up-and-coming glass ceiling breaker. Smaller and a little more out of the way sounded like a vacation, not an attempt to rebuild. She couldn’t afford to be smaller and out of the way.

  “Anette, I’m gonna be honest. You’re done. Toxic. Radioactive, even. There’s not a reputable company in the world that’ll take a chance with you. Find a small town, get a decent job—become a teacher or a secretary or something—and move on.”

  “Shit, Rog.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve gotta go. Client’s coming in. If you change your mind about dinner, let me know. It’ll be good for you to see a friendly face.”

  The line went dead, but Anette kept holding the phone to her ear like a lifeline. For almost a minute, she stood there, hoping it’d ring again and Roger would call with an idea to get her back in the saddle again. A start-up or a struggling company somewhere. Anything.

  The call didn’t come.

  Anette was alone.

  “I caught a red-eye flight to La Guardia that night, landed in New York City at four in the morning, and hailed a taxi out to Jersey. It took less than an hour to find a condo but almost two months to get a gig as a secretary at a doctor’s office. The whole time, my savings tanked,” Anette said.

  I couldn’t decide what to feel. On the one hand, Anette had lost everything. On the other, she had no idea how comfortable her landing had been—and I wasn’t sure she deserved that comfort. She’d cheated and broken the law to get where she’d been. And from the look on Barry’s face, I could tell he felt the same. He turned away and refocused on the football game.

  “Did you see your kids?” I asked, trying to focus on what was important to her.

  “I did. Every Saturday for a few hours. I never applied for joint custody, though. I read somewhere that it can really screw a kid up if their parents can’t work together and co-parent effectively, and every time I saw Todd, it felt like another dagger in my heart. He abandoned me, just like everyone else. I still hate him. ”

  She said it with so much conviction and venom that I couldn’t help but believe her. Her eyes, though…

  Both gray-black eyes glistened with moisture, and a single tear had escaped from the left one. Anette wiped it away absently, her gaze drifting toward the big city just north of us. “They’re probably evacuating. I hope they make it. Even Todd. But I’m going to stay here.”

  The empty martini glass sat on the bar, overlapping a dark ring on the corner that’d been stained into the finish. I stared at it for a second, unsure what to say.

  The TV flickered. So did the rest of the power. The already dim bar plunged into darkness for a second, and the cacophony of honking horns and sirens poured in from outside. Then the power flicked back on, and the Giants Super Bowl DVD showed its menu screen again.

  I grabbed the remote and flicked through the games. “The Steelers’ one,” Barry said a little too loudly. I winced but found the game and got the show rolling again.