The Last Call

The bar mirror reflected everything she didn't want to see: the stray gray **hair** escaping her messy bun, the exhaustion etched around her eyes, the way her hands shook around her third gin and tonic. Outside, **lightning** fractured the sky—an appropriate metaphor, she thought bitterly, for the way her marriage had been cleaved apart by eight years of quiet erosion.

Her **iPhone** vibrated against the scarred wood of the table. Again.

She didn't need to look. She knew it was him, or maybe it wasn't. Maybe he'd finally stopped calling altogether, and this was just the universe's way of reminding her that she was thirty-seven, alone, and sitting in a dive bar at midnight on a Tuesday. The bartender, a younger man with kind eyes and a beaten-up fedora, had stopped asking if she was okay an hour ago. He just kept refilling her drink, sliding the bowl of complementary pretzels closer each time.

"You leaving soon, or you want another?" he asked now, not unkindly.

She looked up. The man's **hat** sat on the counter beside him—a vintage thing, smelling faintly of tobacco and rain. It made her think of her father, of how men used to be, of how everything used to be simpler somehow.

"One more," she heard herself say. "Then I'll go."

Her phone lit up again. This time she looked.

*Can we talk? Please. I'm at the apartment.*

The words blurred together. Eight months of separation, of careful distance, of pretending she was moving forward, and here she was—still tethered to him by nothing more than habit and fear. The lightning flashed again, illuminating the empty stool beside her, the space where someone should have been sitting. Where she wished someone was sitting.

She finished her drink in one swallow. The gin burned going down, clean and sharp and honest.

"Actually," she said, sliding a twenty across the bar, "I think I'm done."

She walked out into the storm without checking her phone again. Some things, she finally understood, were better left unanswered.