Second Chance At Last Call

She had promised herself one night. No crying. No calling her daughter to say she was fine in the careful voice that meant she wasn’t. No sitting at home while the house reminded her of every room Michael had stopped entering years before.

She would have one drink, maybe two, and prove she could occupy a room without belonging to anyone in it.

A country song rolled through the speakers, all steel guitar and regret. Couples crowded the dance floor. Men leaned over their beers. Women laughed in groups beneath strings of amber lights.

Cassidy walked toward the bar as if she knew exactly where she was going.

The bartender glanced up. “What can I get you?”

“Bourbon. Neat.”

He poured it and slid the glass toward her.

Cassidy took the first swallow too quickly. Heat spread down her throat and settled in her chest, not comfort exactly, but something with edges she could recognize.

The bar was packed enough that every stool had been claimed except one.

It sat beside a woman with dark blond hair cut just below her jaw, a denim jacket folded over the back of her chair, and a glass of white wine held loosely between two fingers. She looked about Cassidy’s age, maybe a little younger. Fifty-two, Cassidy would later learn. For now, she noticed the woman’s boots, polished but scuffed at the toes, and the way she kept turning her wedding ring around and around her finger.

Cassidy took the empty stool.

The woman looked over. Her eyes were gray-green, direct without being intrusive.

“Bold choice,” she said.

Cassidy glanced at the bourbon. “The drink?”

“The empty seat. Around here, an empty seat usually means somebody’s saving it.”

Cassidy looked at the bar, then at the woman. “Is somebody saving this one?”

“No.”

“Then I’m in luck.”

The woman’s mouth curved. “Depends who you ask.”

Cassidy laughed once, surprised by it. “I’m Cassidy.”

“Becca.”

They shook hands over the narrow space between their glasses. Becca’s palm was warm. Cassidy felt the contact longer than necessary before pulling away.

The bartender returned with a napkin. “You need a menu?”

“I know what I want,” Cassidy said.

Becca lifted her wine. “That makes one of us.”

There was something in the way she said it - not flirtation, exactly. More like an admission she had not meant to make aloud.

Cassidy took another sip. “You come here often?”

“Only when I’m trying to make a point.”

“What point?”

Becca looked toward the dance floor, where a man in a pearl-snap shirt was guiding his partner through a turn neither of them quite managed. “That I can still go somewhere without explaining myself.”

Cassidy’s fingers tightened around her glass.

Becca noticed. “Sorry. That was heavier than the question required.”

“No.” Cassidy watched the dancers stumble and recover. “It was accurate.”

The song ended. Applause rose from the floor, generous and unearned. The bartender turned up the music, and a faster song filled the room.

Becca tapped her wineglass with one fingernail. “You’re celebrating?”

“Divorce.”

The word landed between them with more weight than Cassidy expected.

Becca’s eyebrows rose. “Congratulations?”

“That’s what everyone keeps saying.”

“Do you feel congratulated?”

Cassidy turned toward her. The question was too honest for a stranger, which made it easier to answer.

“I feel like I won a house I don’t know how to live in.”

Becca’s expression changed. The humor left it, but not the warmth. “That sounds lonely.”

“It’s a farmhouse. Loneliness comes with the property taxes.”

Becca laughed, and this time Cassidy watched the laugh arrive. It started in her eyes, then loosened her mouth, then bent her shoulders forward as if the sound had surprised her too.

Cassidy wanted to make it happen again.

“So,” Becca said, “you kept the house?”

“And a settlement.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Somebody should pay you for twenty-eight years of unpaid emotional labor.”

Cassidy nearly choked on her bourbon. “You say that like you’ve been waiting all night.”

“I say a lot of things after one glass of wine.”

“Only one?”

Becca glanced at the bartender. “This is my second.”

Cassidy looked at the empty glass near Becca’s elbow. “You’re ahead of me.”

“Not for long.”

The bartender came by, and Cassidy lifted two fingers. “Another.”

She heard herself order it and felt the first small failure of the evening. She had come to feel nothing. Instead, she was sitting beside a stranger whose voice had a low, dry edge and whose knee brushed Cassidy’s whenever someone passed behind them.

The second bourbon arrived with a bowl of salted peanuts. Becca pushed the bowl between them without asking.

“What about you?” Cassidy said. “You celebrating something?”

Becca rolled the ring beneath her thumb. “I’m newly divorced.”

Cassidy looked at the ring, then back at her face. “Newly?”

“Three weeks.”

“Congratulations.”

“See?” Becca said. “It sounds strange when you say it.”

Cassidy smiled. “I’m learning.”

Becca took a drink. “There wasn’t a dramatic reason. No affair. No hidden family. No police showing up at the door.”

“That’s a low bar.”

“It was a very quiet marriage.” She looked down at her wine. “Quiet enough that one day I realized we’d been waiting for the other person to want something for years.”

Cassidy felt the words settle somewhere beneath her ribs.

“Did either of you?” she asked.

“Want something?”

“Want each other.”

Becca’s gaze met hers. The music pressed around them, loud and bright, but the space between their stools seemed to narrow.

“Once,” Becca said. “A long time ago.”

Cassidy did not ask what happened. She knew the answer was probably more complicated than a single sentence, and she did not yet know whether she had earned it.

A man approached from the dance floor and pointed at the empty space beside Becca’s chair. “You saving anybody now?”

Becca didn’t look at him. “No.”

He smiled at Cassidy. “Then maybe I can - ”

“She’s with me,” Becca said.

The words came easily, almost lazily. But her hand moved across the bar and settled beside Cassidy’s, not touching. Close enough that Cassidy felt the warmth of it.

The man hesitated, read the room incorrectly or correctly, and left with a shrug.

Cassidy stared at Becca’s hand. “Am I?”

Becca’s fingers curled around the stem of her glass. “You looked like you needed rescuing.”

“I don’t.”

“I know.”

The answer stopped Cassidy.

Becca turned toward her. “You looked like you wanted somebody to sit beside you without asking you to be happy.”

The bar noise seemed to fall away - not disappear, but soften around the edges.

Cassidy had spent the day being congratulated, advised, praised for her courage, and told she would find herself now. Nobody had said anything about sitting beside her.

She swallowed. “That’s a very specific thing to notice.”

“I notice too much.”

“Does it get you in trouble?”

“Constantly.”

Cassidy smiled, but it wavered. “I’m not looking for anything.”

“Neither am I.”

“Good.”

“Good,” Becca agreed.

Neither moved away.

The next song was slower, and the couples returned to the floor. Becca watched them for a moment, then shook her head.

“Do you dance?” Cassidy asked.

“Not with strangers.”

“Smart.”

“Do you?”

“Not since 1998.”

“That specific?”

“My husband hated dancing. I stopped asking.”

Becca’s gaze sharpened. “You say that like you stopped asking for more than dancing.”

Cassidy looked at her.

The question had no accusation in it. That made it harder to dismiss.

She took a drink instead. The bourbon had softened her defenses but not removed them. “You notice too much.”

“I warned you.”

They stayed until the bartender called last call.

By then, Cassidy had learned that Becca hated cilantro, loved old country songs, and could imitate the bar’s jukebox voice so perfectly that Cassidy laughed hard enough to wipe tears from the corners of her eyes. Becca had learned that Cassidy once backed a horse trailer into her own mailbox and blamed the mailbox for two full days.

“You’re a dangerous woman,” Becca said.

“I own a tractor. That makes me powerful, not dangerous.”

“Same thing, outside Nashville.”

The bartender set two final drinks in front of them.

“Last call,” he said.

Cassidy looked at the bourbon, then at Becca.

The whole night had been a kind of trespassing. She had entered determined to remain untouched and somehow ended up with her shoulder pressed against a stranger’s, laughing over a story about a disastrous family reunion and a stolen casserole dish.

Becca lifted her glass. “To surviving the evening.”

Cassidy touched her glass to Becca’s. “I was planning to leave numb.”

“And?”

Cassidy should have made a joke. She could feel one forming, something about the bourbon or the jukebox or the suspicious quality of bar peanuts.

Instead, she said, “I’m not.”

Becca’s smile faded into something quieter. “Is that bad?”

Cassidy looked at the exit. Beyond the door, the parking lot waited under white security lights. Her farmhouse waited too, silent and full of rooms that had belonged to a marriage now reduced to paperwork.

Then she looked back at Becca.

“No,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

Becca’s hand rested on the bar between them, palm up now, an offer neither of them named.

Cassidy placed her fingers in it.

The contact was simple. Warm. Entirely voluntary. Still, it felt like a door opening somewhere she had not known existed.

Outside, the sign over the entrance buzzed red against the dark.

LAST CALL.

Cassidy did not want the night to end. She had no idea what Becca wanted, and she was not ready to ask. But when Becca’s thumb brushed once across the back of her hand, Cassidy stayed where she was, holding on while the bartender began turning off the lights.

End of chapter one. 19 more chapters and about 45,860 words in the full book.