I consider her suggestion while staring at a framed photograph of Troy and I on my dresser. It doesn’t take long for me to make my decision.
“Go to your meeting. I’ll go to the Wild Boar.”
“The old neighborhood spot? I was thinking maybe you could go to the rooftop bar of that new hotel in Midtown. That way if you need to get a room to sleep it off you’re just a few steps away.”
“I’m not looking to spend half my paycheck on two overpriced drinks. I just want to get good and drunk and forget this night ever happened.”
“Okay, call me when you leave there so that I know you arrived home safely.”
“It’s literally around the corner, Dena. I’m walking.”
“Exactly! Some pervert could follow you home and attack you in the stairwell.”
“I need you to stop watching Criminal Minds all the time and get to your meeting. I’ll be fine. This neighborhood is safe, and I’ve been going to that bar ever since I was twenty-one years old. It’s like that old television show Cheers. Everyone knows me there.”
Dena chuckles lightly through the phone. “I doubt that, babe. You haven’t been to that bar in a very long time, but okay, maybe you just send me a quick text when you get back home. That will be acceptable.”
“If I’m not drunk enough to forget to do it, then agreed.”
“Oh my God, who are you and where is my friend who always does the responsible thing?” Dena mocks.
“And look where that got me.”
I’m practically in a daze as I peel off my work clothes and change into a pair of jeans and the softest t-shirt I own. I take down my neat topknot that my hair was in all day and let it fall casually around my face. It actually looks kind of nice this way and makes my face look softer and less severe.
All I take with me is a credit card, my ID, and my cell phone because getting to the Wild Boar Tavern is only a ten-minute walk from my apartment.
The plan is simple for tonight.
I’m going to get drunk and try to forget the last two years of my life. Then I’ll stagger back home and sleep in for the first time in probably eight months. I’ve been working nonstop to secure my position at the hospital and to build a bigger life with Troy, but right now all of that seems meaningless.
Tonight, I feel like a complete failure at everything in my life and I’m not even sure how I blundered the test.
Oh, wait a minute, I know how. I trusted Troy.
But the biggest fail?
Was that I dared to trust myself.
Five
ADRIENNE
The Wild Boarbelongs in a 1970s mob movie. It’s a throwback bar nestled in downtown Manhattan that desperately needs an interior decorator and some better lighting. They covered the walls in what has to be at least fifty-year-old dark wood paneling and 8x10 pictures of who I think are celebrities that may have passed through the bar in its heyday. Yet with all that said, it’s one of the more popular bars in the area. It’s tight and loud and not the type of place that you would usually find a medical professional like myself, but this place holds a lot of memories and call me old-fashioned but I’m a sucker for nostalgia.
“Welcome to the Wild Boar. Would you like to sit at the bar?”
A server I’ve never met before greets me at the door. I think about how I told Dena that this ismybar, but she was right, I haven’t been here in ages. No one looks familiar except one bartender. The server asks if I want to sit at the bar because that’s what you do with people who come to a bar and grill alone, but I don’t care about how pathetic I may look.
Hell, let’s be honest here, I am pathetic.
“No, I’ll take the table in the corner, please.”
If I’m going to get shit-faced, I don’t need an audience while I do it.
It’s so crowded tonight that I need to suck in my stomach as we both maneuver ourselves through the packed crowd standing at the bar and tall-top tables. The server seats me at a small round table near the old-fashioned jukebox in the corner. A Wild Boar treasure.
“This table good?”
