“I…I just need a drink,” I tell her, and the elevator doors swing open right when I say it.
Shaking her head, she takes one step forward and laces her arm in mine, dragging me inside the elevator.
“Let’s go to the bar downstairs.”
Not a trace of hesitation in her voice. She just tells it like it is, leaving me no room to protest.
Ah, what the fuck. I need a drink anyway. Anything to numb the disappointment.
Downstairs, I follow her all the way toward the dimly lit bar, and we take a seat at the counter. The place is deserted, except for a couple on the far-end of the counter. Chet Baker’s playing on the stereo, the mellow sound of his voice adding a final touch to the scene.
“Whiskey, straight,” I tell the bartender, “and make it double.”
“Same here,” Kat says with a quick nod.
“Your daughter’s asleep upstairs, and you’re drinking whiskey?” I ask her, more curious than anything.
Katherine was always the responsible one, and I don’t see that changing.
But you never know.
“My daughter?”
“Yeah, the little girl on your couch.”
“You’ve always been an idiot, you know that?”
She sighs, rubbing her forehead with one hand as she takes her whiskey glass with the other. Downing the whole thing at once, she turns around in her seat to look at me.
“That was Anna. She’s my niece.”
“You’re…niece?”
“My niece,” she repeats patiently. “My sister and her kid are spending the week with me.”
“So…you don’t have children?”
“No.”
“But…you’re married, right?”
“No.”
“No? But—”
“But what? You heard that Philip proposed, I bet…but so what? I said no. We broke up before I went to college, and I never married.”
Holy fucking shit.
Am I hearing this right? Have I been the King of Idiots for twelve years straight?
That has to be a fucking record.
“Say that again.”
“I don’t have any children. I’m not married. And now…” she lowers her voice, still looking straight into my eyes, and smiles seductively.
“Now I want to know why you came all the way here after all this time.”