MADLY (New York Trilogy no. 2)

Chapter 1

Allie made bad decisions when she felt uncomfortable. Her mom taking off right before her thirtieth wedding anniversary had made her super uncomfortable.

Which explained, in a roundabout way, why she was skulking in a trench coat on a Sunday night at the back corner table of Wisconsin-cum-Greenwich Village rather than, say, consulting with her sister, May, or her father, or her best friend Elvira, who had pointed out this bad-decision tendency of Allie's in the first place.

Not that it was news to her. Bad decisions were just in her. She'd been the tantrum-throwing toddler, the first kindergartener to get suspended for fighting on the playground in the history of her elementary school, the middle-schooler who ran away all the way to Milwaukee and had to be retrieved with the help of police, the college student who hated her French professor so much she stopped going to class and ended up failing and tanking her GPA, and, to top it all off, the bride who canceled her wedding on the day of and cost her parents and her fiancé's parents and her guests thousands in nonrefundable deposits.

May never even got a detention.

Don't think about what Elvira would say, she reminded herself. Or May. For sure don't think about May. Just fix this mess. Whatever it takes.

Fix This Mess had been her motto yesterday afternoon, when she'd figured out her mom was gone and her dad didn't know where she'd taken off to or when she'd be back.

"It would help me out a lot if you'd let me buy you a drink," she suggested.

"Why?" Water beaded on the shoulders of his suit jacket. His expression sat somewhere between perplexed and unflappable.

"I feel like we should."

This brought something like a smile to his lips-not quite there, but almost. "Give me a good reason."

At the bar, Allie's mother laughed again. "You did not," she said with slurred delight. "You did not!" Then a barstool scraped the floor, and she said, "I need to visit the ladies'."

Shit.

Shit shit shit. Also, shit.

The route to the bathroom would take her mother right past her, which meant her only hope of avoiding detection was the Englishman and/or Australian standing right in front of her. But his body wouldn't block Allie from her mother's view-not from all the angles she'd have on Allie's corner table as she walked by.

He needed to sit.

Allie felt mad-giddy and stupid and off her rocker. But she'd blown past her moment of decision a ways back, either when she illegally logged into her mom's credit card account to snoop through her statements or else when Allie blew off her work, lied to her dad, and charged a last-minute plane fare from Milwaukee to Newark to her own credit card.

Either way. She didn't have room for scruples or sensibility or whatever it was that held ordinary people back. Not anymore. She'd shoved all her chips across the table on a bluff. Her only option was to keep bluffing.

The man wanted one good reason to sit down with her. She briefly considered batting her eyelashes, but past attempts had mostly led to people asking her if she had something in her eye. Instead, she put both hands on the table, leaned forward, and said, with utter honesty, "Because you never know when the person you meet at a bar might turn out to be the most interesting thing to happen to you in all your life."

It was true, too. Any life could turn on a dime. Hers had. Twice.

This might be the third time.

When he didn't reply right away, she tugged at his sleeve. "Come on. What have you got to lose?"

He glanced at the phone still in his hand, thumbed it to sleep, and said, "Nothing, actually."