4. Evie
EVIE
Hazel and I have an ongoing list of a dozen bars in this neighborhood we’re supposed to explore. Yet, like a pair of creatures of habit, we find ourselves back at the Cherry Bomb every single week.
The place is a low-lit dive where a flickering neon cherry buzzes in the front glass, missing enough letters that it usually just reads err omb to the street.
It’s got an ancient jukebox filled with every song we actually like, and a bartender named Cora who starts prepping our drinks the moment we clear the threshold.
We stumbled into this spot last year after a gallery opening nearby that turned out to be a complete disaster. It wasn’t much of a gallery—just a guy named Derek trying to sell charcoal sketches of his own jawline in a rented storefront—but the detour led us here.
Hazel insists it was destiny. I’m fairly certain it was just a poorly lit street corner and a shared need for a drink. Either way, it’s where we live now.
“Okay, but I need you to understand.” Hazel shakes her head, a dark brown curl escaping from its bobby pin. “That this prenup was written by someone who doesn’t understand love and also possibly hates women.”
I groan. “You’ve been talking about this prenup for forty minutes.”
“Because it’s a crime, Evie, and I’m the detective.”
This is Hazel Monroe: divorce lawyer, enthusiast of basically everything, and my best friend since we were thirteen years old.
We were assigned seats next to each other in homeroom.
On the first day, she leaned over to tell me she liked my sweater, the one with the little embroidered daisies on the collar.
I told her it once belonged to my mom. Vintage, from the eighties.
She smiled so earnestly and said, “That’s really cool.”
That was it. We’ve been inseparable ever since. We went to the same high school—go Coyotes!—then attended UNLV, where I studied fine arts, and she charged headfirst into pre-law. Same dorm, then same apartment. The whole way through.
She became a divorce lawyer because, in her own words, she believes wholeheartedly in the power of true love. I’ve heard her explain the logic many, many times, and I still couldn’t tell you how it tracks.
Tonight, she’s wearing a burnt-orange top and earrings that dangle to her shoulders. She has very strong opinions about lots of things, and she happens to be my favorite person on God’s green earth.
Hazel doesn’t miss a beat as Cora slides two drinks across the bar—a vodka soda for Hazel, a whiskey ginger for me.
“What I’m saying,” Hazel continues, undeterred, “is that if you write a prenup that detailed, you’re already grieving the relationship. I mean, specifying who gets the air fryer in the event of infidelity. Overkill.”
“Aren’t prenups meant to be, like, practical? Something you’d advise literally anyone with assets to get?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t negate reality,” she replies dramatically. “When you sign one like that, you’re standing at the altar holding a would-be funeral in your heart.”
“You’d know about that,” I say with a snort. “Adjacent to the industry.”
She places a hand over her heart. “Unlike you, I am still a romantic.”
I let out a laugh, and for a second, it actually feels honest. The weight of this bizarre week is still leaning on my ribs—the hole I spent my Saturday morning digging, the cold granite, and that man in the dark overcoat who told me to call him by his first name.
I haven’t breathed a word of it to Hazel. I’ve got the whole encounter folded up small in my pocket, tucked away with the work order like a secret I’m not ready to share. In this line of work, it’s nothing out of the ordinary, but for some reason, I can’t seem to put it down.
“Wanna dance?” I ask.
“About damn time,” she says, hopping off her stool like she’s been waiting for the starting gun. “I was starting to feel like part of the furniture.”
“We’ve been here twenty minutes.”
She ignores me, towing me toward the small patch of floor where the jukebox is currently playing “Dreams.” We both loudly sing along.
Hazel does a theatrical spin that nearly takes me out, and I’m laughing hard enough to lose my footing.
A guy by the bar whistles; someone else complains about the floor space.
“We’re bringing culture to this establishment,” Hazel informs them.
“Philistines!”
By the time the track shifts into “Dancing in the Dark,” I’m loose and warm.
A man peels away from the bar during the slow synth intro, approaching us. He’s handsome in a way that won’t stick in my memory, with light hair and the kind of forearms that suggest he spends his weekends doing something physical.
He settles a hand on my waist, a silent request to join in, and I let him. We move through two more songs while Hazel finds a target of her own—taller, with a haircut that was a mistake—and we trade check-in looks across the crowd.
This guy is actually a decent dancer, which is a rare find in a dive like this. He tells me his name—something starting with an M that I immediately lose to the bass—and I give him mine.
Ten minutes into our dance, he leans down, his breath warm against my ear. “You smell like dirt.” It’s a fair observation. I showered before we left, but some parts of the day refuse to be scrubbed off.
“Work thing,” I say.
“What do you do?”
I huff a laugh. “You definitely don’t want to know.”
He grins, taking it as a challenge, and I let him spend the next three minutes guessing—paramedic, no; landscaper, warmer; geologist, not even close—before I disentangle myself, telling him I need to find some air.
The smoking patio out back is a slab of cracked concrete with two plastic chairs, a single string of flickering bulbs, and an unencumbered view of the dumpster. It’s perfectly industrial bleak.
I’m not a regular smoker, but Hazel always has a pack of Camels in her bag for emergencies. Tonight feels like one.
I light up, letting the smoke drift away into the dry night, taking slow pulls that I feel all the way down.
In late autumn, Vegas does this thing where the heat just finally breaks. It’s like the entire valley takes a breath. And above the trash and the orange electric glow of the Strip, there are actually a few stars visible through the haze.
A small, unearned miracle.
I puff again, the silence of the alley a relief. Hazel finds me ten minutes later, her coat already zipped.
“Deposition at 8:00 a.m.,” she says, looking genuinely sorry about it. “The prenup man cometh.”
“Go fight the good fight.”
She kisses my cheek, smelling of vodka and that cinnamon gum she uses to hide it. “You okay? You’ve been spacey tonight.”
I consider telling her. That I buried a man my age today, that his brother is a professional athlete with those big, wounded brown eyes. A man who looked at me like a door left open, making me wish I hadn’t looked back.
“I’m good,” I say instead. “Just a long week.”
She gives me a look that says she knows I’m lying, but she lets it go. That’s the gift of a decade-long friendship—the benefit of the doubt, on credit.
“Text me when you’re in,” she says, and then she’s gone, her burnt-orange top swallowed by the neon parking lot.
I don’t go back inside. The guy on the floor was nice enough, but I’d regret the morning after, and I’ve had enough of that mind meld this week. I start walking.
It’s a mile and a half back to my apartment, and I’m doing it on foot because my car’s been making a sound like a dying accordion for two weeks. I have to ration its remaining heartbeats for things that actually matter.
The route takes me past a 7-Eleven, a chapel with a flickering pink wedding ring, and a gas station, where I stand for sixty seconds debating a hot dog. It would be my third this week, and I have to have some standards.
My place is on the second floor of a fourplex the color of a weathered Band-Aid. Out here, the city starts to thin, and the desert presses in, the noise of the Strip finally fading away.
Most people assume Vegas is nothing but the glitter. They forget it’s a desert first. Drive fifteen minutes in any direction, and the neon evaporates, replaced by the scent of creosote and old dust.
I have a terrace, in the most technical sense. A concrete step, a railing, and just enough room for a single folding chair. I sit there when I can’t shut my brain off, which is why I’m folding myself into it now. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howls.
Shit happens, and then you die, and someone talks about it like it’s weather.
That’s the easy version. Maybe it’s the only one that works.
I pull out my phone and shoot Hazel a text.
Evie
home, alive, love you
Then I lean my head back against the stucco, look up at that handful of stars, and think—with no particular destination in mind—about a man with a mustache and a neck tattoo of dahlias.
He was handsome. Not in the polished, corporate way I’d expect from a face on a billboard. Dark hair in a shaggy mullet that should’ve been a disaster but wasn’t. A mustache. A jaw that hadn’t seen a razor since Tuesday.
But it doesn’t matter. He’s a grieving client I’ll never see again, and I’m out here memorizing his side profile like a teenager. I head inside before I can do any more of it.
A persistent buzzing drags me awake at 7:42 on a Monday morning, which is a remarkably rude hour for anything other than an alarm I’ve personally consented to. I fumble for my phone on the nightstand, answering without bothering to check the screen.
“’Lo.”
“Did I wake you?” my dad asks, his tone suggesting he already knows the answer.
“Obviously,” I mutter, pushing myself upright. “What’s happened? Did I leave the supply room open? Because I specifically remember the latch—”
“You’re fine, Evie. Stop worrying.” I can hear the familiar static of the funeral home in the background—the buzz of the industrial refrigeration, the NPR broadcast he always keeps at a whisper. He’s likely been at his desk since sunrise. “It’s about the Maxwell family.”
A cold weight settles behind my ribs.
“What about them?” I ask, my voice going professional.
“The older son called,” he says. “Briggs. He wants to meet with you.”
The last of the sleep evaporates instantly. I am suddenly, inconveniently awake.
“With me?”
I’m already running the numbers on our last encounter. He was a bit of an asshole yesterday, but I was arguably worse. I have a long-standing policy against giving men the benefit of the doubt, so I hadn’t given him an inch—never mind that his brother had barely been in the ground an hour.
“Oh, God,” I say. “Did he lodge a complaint?”
“On what grounds?”
“For—” I scrub a hand over my face. “I might have shared some unremarkable trivia. At the cemetery. Something clinical. About the leading causes of death.” I wince. “I used statistics, Dad.”
He sighs, exasperated. “Evie.”
“He’s a local legend. Famous people have entire operations behind them. He’s going to have my name dragged through a press release. I’m going to be a cautionary slide at a public relations seminar—and then the gravedigger girl rattled off the—”
“Evie.” Firmer now. “You’re not in trouble.”
I stop mid-spiral. “I’m not?”
“No.”
“Then why the hell does he want to meet with me?”
The radio in the background murmurs something about a backup on the 215.
“He has a proposal for you,” my dad says finally. “Didn’t want to discuss the logistics over the phone. Asked if you’d meet him somewhere neutral.”
“Neutral?” The word tastes like copper. “What, like a DMV?”
“More like a coffee joint, I’d imagine,” he replies drily. “He was perfectly polite about it. More words than he managed at the service, frankly.”
A proposal. From Briggs Maxwell. I don’t have the faintest idea what a man that popular could possibly want from a woman like me. Maybe he wants to warn me he’s filing a lawsuit. Or leaving a formal review for the Better Business Bureau.
That would be on brand for someone with an agent, wouldn’t it?
“What did you tell him?” I ask.
“I told him I’d run it by you.” A beat. “So I’m running it.”
I should say no. Whatever this is, it’s likely a complication I don’t have the energy or the time for. I have student debt up to my eyes and a very full plate of just keeping myself upright. I don’t have room for strange proposals from even stranger men.
Still, I’m curious, and I’ve always been constitutionally incapable of leaving a door closed once I’ve seen it. Sue me.
“Tell him okay,” I say. “He can text me the time and place.”
“I’ll relay the message. Stop by the printer on your way in tomorrow morning, if you can. And don’t forget the guest books. Phil was supposed to handle it, so I assume it didn’t happen.”
I fall back against the pillow, the adrenaline beginning to dip. “You got it.”
“Kiddo, you get any sleep at all last night?”
“Tons,” I lie.
I hang up, drop the phone on my chest, and stare at the stucco. Whatever Briggs Maxwell wants, it isn’t going to make my life simpler. But, to my eternal detriment, I’ve never once known how to want the simple thing.