Page 10 of Fifth Avenue Fling

“The agency are cowboys. They also tweaked my résumé so much I sounded like Nanny McPhee. Quinn tookbloodfrom me. He means business.”

Her hands release mine as she sinks back into her seat. We both go silent.

“Maybe they won’t care what’s on your record? You didn’t go on amurderspree. It was just a… series of unfortunate events.”

I smile to humor her. That’s not how the police saw it and that’s not what’s on my record.

Drawing a slow breath through her nose, she places her fingertips over her eyelids. “Deep breaths. Positive thoughts. We have to have faith. One year from now, we’ll be celebrating in this bar as legal citizens of New York. I’ll be working for the NYPD, probably having earned a medal of honor, and you’ll be a carpenter winning… Carpenter of the Year!”

She still has her eyes closed, so she can’t see mine rolling. “Have you been readingThe Secretagain?”

She opens her eyes and grins. “If youbelieveit will happen, it will happen.”

I exhale heavily and take a large gulp of my Manhattan, welcoming the burn on its way down. If my last hope is wishful thinking, it’s a sad state of affairs.

“I’llberightback.”Orla slides off her stool, causing her skirt to ride up. “Gotta go to the bathroom.”

“I’ll be here,” I say cheerfully, swirling the last of my cocktail. “For now,” I add quietly to myself.

I watch Orla walk away. My heart twinges. Soon, we won’t be doing this together. We’ve been best friends since we were kids. We were neighbors, we went to school together, and we bunked off school together. The only time we spent apart was when she’d go on holiday to the United States to visit her relatives, and I wassojealous.

Now these past few months, we’ve living in each other’s pockets, in the loft of Uncle Sean’s house in Queens.

“He’shere,” the woman behind me says, interrupting my private pity party. Her excited tone makes me want to eavesdrop on their conversation. “I saw him coming out of the restrooms.”

“You’re kidding me,” whoever is with her replies. “We have to find a way to bump into him accidentally.”

I scan the bar, looking for signs of someone famous, mildly curious. Who’s here? The guy in the corner looks vaguely like Al Pacino.

The woman says something in a lower voice to her friend, which is inaudible to me. Her friend laughs. I wish I could catch more of their chat.

I lean back slightly on my stool. This isn’t a good plan, considering I’m a bit wobbly from the cocktails.

Bad timing.

The bartender zooms past me. I barely catch his arm as he reaches for my glass.

“Hang on!” I lunge forward and snatch it up, my fingers gripping the stem firmly. “I’m not finished.”

He looks at the nearly empty glass and then at me, barely suppressing an eye roll.

I scowl in return. Waste not, want not. It’s no more than a dribble, but I’m not wasting a drop.

I tilt the glass back, making sure I don’t miss a single drop, then place the empty glass in front of him.

“I’ve been thinking in the bathroom,” Orla announces as she returns.

I wait for the grand revelation.

“We should have one more,” she says, smiling at me with glazed eyes. “One more, and then we’ll head home.”

***

One becomes four. We drift around the hotel’s ground level, surrounded by overpriced, high-end stores, in pursuit of the entrance.

Orla is going in and out of stores we have no business being in, and I wish I could put her on a leash.

It takes me a moment or two to realize what the buzzing noise is. The stolen cocktail glass clinks noisily against the toiletries from the hotel bathroom as I struggle to locate my phone under all the crap in my bag. I finally find it under the soaps and fish it out.

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