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She'd taken the subway home with her jaw set and her briefcase held in both hands in front of her like a shield. She'd gotten on at the wrong entrance and had to push through the turnstile going the wrong direction and a man in a Yankees cap had made a noise at her and she'd looked at him with her full face until he looked away, which she was good at, which was maybe the only thing she had going for her tonight. She stood for the whole ride because she didn't trust herself to sit down and then have to stand back up again. She watched the dark tunnel walls and thought about nothing on purpose.

Her building door stuck the way the stupid door always stuck. She shoulder-checked it harder than necessary.

She stood in the dark for a long time, breathing through her mouth. Then she went to the closet instead of the shower or the bed or the bottle of sleeping pills she wasn’t supposed to still have. She didn’t want comfort. She didn’t need to mope on her own in her empty apartment. She didn’t need to sit. Didn’t need to think. Didn’t need to call anyone. Not Olivia, obviously. Not her mother, who would ask questions, too many of them, each one landing just slightly off-center from where it hurt, close enough to sting. Not anyone who knew her well enough to hear it in her voice, which narrowed the list considerably and then narrowed it again.

The apartment was quiet. Obviously. The only other person to set foot in there was her landlord four months ago when the fridge started leaking. She'd bought the lamp in the corner because the overhead light was too bright and she'd thought the lamp would make the place feel warmer. It made it feel like she was always about to be interrogated. She didn't look at it.

She wasn’t looking for any dress in particular. She flipped through hangers without really seeing them, her fingers catching on fabric she couldn’t have named. Something that would piss off the detective, who just hated when Casey showed a sliver too much of her skin. Who had once looked at her across the bullpen when Casey had worn a blouse with two buttons undone—two, not three, not four, two—with an expression that managed to be both concerned and faintly disapproving, the way Olivia looked at a lot of things that had nothing to do with her. Who had said, once, in that stupid tone she used when she was pretending to be casual, you know you don’t have to do that. As if Casey’s choices were symptoms. As if everything Casey did that Olivia didn’t understand was a cry for help that Olivia had personally been appointed to interpret.

She wanted to do something Olivia would hate. Not for Olivia to see—she’d never see it, that was fine, that was almost the point. Just to do it anyway. To be, for one night, exactly the woman Olivia had always looked at her like she was trying not to become.

She found it wedged between a blazer she wore to court and a cardigan she wore everywhere else, shoved to the far left side of the rod where things went when she couldn't decide whether to keep them. A black dress she'd bought two years ago for a date that had never happened. The guy had cancelled the day before and she'd never returned the dress because returning it felt like admitting defeat, like letting the non-event take something else from her on top of the evening she'd already spent shaving her legs. So it had lived here between the blazer and the cardigan, no tags because she'd tried it on so many times she'd finally just taken them off.

Short. The hem would hit her maybe four inches above the knee. The back was—the back was nothing, really. Two delicate straps crossing over bare skin that ended right above the dimples at the base of her spine.

The straps sat cool against her shoulder blades. She reached back and adjusted them and felt the open air on her spine and thought, distantly, that she looked like someone who had somewhere to be. Then, she thought, with some satisfaction, that Olivia would absolutely hate it.

She stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself in it and waited for the part where she took it off and found something sensible. She watched her own face for the tell—the slight tightening around the eyes, the almost-imperceptible pull at the corner of her mouth that meant she'd talked herself out of something. She knew her own face well. She'd spent years making sure it didn't give anything away in court, which meant she'd spent years learning every way it tried to. The part just didn't come.

She looked good. She knew she looked good, had always known it in the abstract way you knew things about yourself that other people confirmed occasionally and you were not supposed to say out loud. She had good legs and good cheekbones and she was funny and she was smart and she was so tired of all of that being completely invisible to the one person who was supposed to—who had—who looked at her every day and saw a case file in a blazer. A liability. A woman with a history with this. She wanted someone to look at her tonight the way she deserved to be looked at, which was like she was something, which was like she was a person who existed in a body that was worth noticing. It wasn’t complicated. Olivia had made it complicated but it wasn’t.

She did her makeup heavier than she would for court or for anywhere, really. Concealer she usually skipped, pressed carefully into the shadows under her eyes that had been there since a case in February that she wasn't going to think about. Blush higher on her cheekbones than was strictly natural. Dark around the eyes—darker than she'd worn since law school, since she was someone who cared more about being looked at than being believed, before she'd learned those were in opposition and chosen accordingly. She never let herself do this on work nights because she had to be taken seriously. She always had to be taken seriously. She'd built everything on it. She'd made it the thing that was non-negotiable and then she'd made it the thing that was non-negotiable at the expense of other things and at some point, at some point she'd lost track of whether she'd chosen it or whether it had just become who she was.

Tonight she pressed the liner close to her lash line and smudged it with her thumb the way her college roommate used to do it over the sink in their shared bathroom, already half-dressed for somewhere. The way women did it when they were not thinking about morning.

She looked at herself. She didn't recognize the woman exactly. That was fine.

That was, in fact, the point.

The bar she’d chosen for the night was twelve blocks from her building, but despite the favorable proximity, having walked past it a hundred times, she had never gone in. It was a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, one without a sign above the door, only a faded decal plastered on the front glass to identify it. The kind where all the stools at the counter were different heights and the floor stuck slightly under your shoes. Not a lawyer bar. Not anywhere anyone she worked with would find her. Not anywhere she'd have to be Casey Novak, ADA, with her posture straight and her face arranged into something professional and her opinions kept in the back of her throat where they couldn't get her in trouble.

The bartender was some guy in his forties with the expression of a man who had successfully avoided a meaningful thought all day, which questions would likely not spur from, and Casey appreciated that more than she could have articulated.

She ordered a whiskey sour. Then another. Then she switched to something cheaper because the point wasn't to taste it, she wasn't here to enjoy herself, she was here to get drunk, and there was no point being precious about it.

The fight had been about Charlie. Again. Except it hadn't been about Charlie, not really, not the way Olivia framed it. It had started over yet another case involving a defendant with a documented history of paranoid schizophrenia, a defense Casey thought was being handled sloppily, a conversation that had started professional and then turned the same way they always did with Olivia, personal in a way Casey hadn't consented to.

Olivia had that gift. Or that compulsion. Casey had never decided which it was, and she'd had more opportunity than most to figure it out.

I just think, Olivia had said, in the voice she’d use when she’d already made up her mind and was now walking, or rather, dragging Casey toward her desired conclusion like a witness she’d prepped, that your history with this makes it hard for you to be objective.

Her history. Her history, which Olivia knew about because Olivia made it her business to know about everything—pieced together from an incident report she had absolutely no reason to have read, from precinct gossip, and from one night when Casey had been tired and Olivia had been warm and she'd made the mistake of thinking that meant something.

Casey had looked at her for a long moment across the precinct. She just felt something. Not anger, at least, not yet. Something older than anger. Something that had been sitting in the back of her throat since the first time Olivia had looked at a mentally ill defendant with that faux sympathy and then looked at Casey like she was waiting for her to flinch. She’d said something in response, although, by her second drink, she could not recall what that was. She ordered another.

She could call Alex. Alex would answer. Probably. They weren't—Casey didn't know exactly what they were. Alex had come back from wherever Olivia and the others never quite talked about in front of her, drifted back into Casey's orbit. They'd worked a few cases together. Gone out a few times after, just the two of them, drinks or coffee or once a late dinner where they'd stayed two hours longer than either of them had planned and Casey had taken a cab home feeling warm in a way she hadn't thought about too closely. She liked Alex. She thought Alex liked her. It was hard to tell, though, with Alex, who held things close in a way Casey understood and respected even when it made her want to shake her by the shoulders, but she thought—she was pretty sure—that if she called, Alex would pick up.

And she'd say what happened? And Casey would tell her, sloppily probably, given the drinks, and Alex would listen without interrupting which was something Casey didn't take for granted, and then she'd say something quiet and precise and completely devastating about Olivia that would land like a scalpel, and Casey would feel better and worse at the same time. Better because Alex would mean it. Because Alex didn't say things she didn't mean, as far as Casey could tell. Worse because Alex would know. Would have always known. Had been dealing with Olivia since before Casey even had the job, had worked alongside her and argued with her and—whatever else, whatever the details were that Casey didn't have and wasn't owed.

She tried to imagine it, sometimes. Olivia saying those same measured, careful things to Alex. Taking her apart with whatever intentions, that mockingly patient expression, her talent for making concern feel like schoolyard teasing. And then what—going home together? Expecting it to be fine? Expecting Alex to just absorb it and move on because Olivia had meant well, because Olivia always meant well, because meaning well was apparently a get out of jail free card that never expired no matter how many times you used it.

When the whiskey loosened the leash she kept on her uglier thoughts, she Olivia and Alex, together. Tangled up in each other the way Casey kept catching herself picturing at the worst possible moments. Was Olivia rough with Alex too? Because Olivia was always rough with her. Not just sharp-tongued at work—rough in the rare, charged moments when they ended up too close, when the argument bled into something physical and breathless. Olivia’s grip on her wrist too tight. Her voice low and mean against Casey’s ear. Fingers pushing inside her like she was proving a point instead of fucking her. Like she was punishing Casey for wanting it. For being difficult. For making Olivia feel things she didn’t want to feel.

Casey had come to crave that edge, which only made her hate herself more. But did Alex get that version? Or did Alex get the soft one? The one Casey sometimes glimpsed when Olivia let her guard down for half a second—gentle hands, patient mouth, quiet praise instead of that mocking little edge that always slipped into Olivia’s voice when she was touching Casey. Did Olivia fuck Alex slow and reverent, murmuring how good she was, how strong, how perfect? Did she let Alex stay in control, let her keep that elegant composure while Olivia went down on her like she was worshiping instead of dissecting?

Or worse—did Olivia use Casey as the outlet? Sloppy seconds. The place she went when she needed to be mean. When she needed to work out her anger, her control issues, her whatever-the-fuck issues on someone who would take it. Someone she could push around and lecture and still make come harder than she probably should. Someone who would let Olivia pin her down and tell her all the ways she was fucking up her own life while Olivia’s fingers were buried inside her.

Casey stared at the sticky bar top and felt her face burn.

Maybe that was all she was to Olivia. The safe target. The one who could handle the roughness, who secretly got off on the cruelty, who wouldn’t break. While Alex got the version of Olivia that was actually capable of tenderness. The version that didn’t need to dominate or correct or punish every time she touched someone.

She didn't know if that was how it had been. She didn't know the details and didn't particularly want them and also if she was being completely honest with herself, which the whiskey was making easier, she kind of wanted all of them, in the grim rubbernecking way you slowed down past an accident. Just to know. Just to confirm that it wasn't her, that it wasn't something specific to Casey that brought this out in Olivia, that Olivia just—did this. Was like this. Had always been like this with the people she loved, if that was even the right word for whatever Olivia did.

Olivia was just a bitch. That was it. That was the whole explanation. Casey had been turning it over all night looking for something more complicated and that was what she kept arriving at.

She was still thinking about Olivia—or not thinking exactly, more like letting her occupy space the way a bad song did, rattling around her skull without permission—when someone sat down on the stool just beside her. Some guy. Brown hair—or maybe it was blond? It was dark, and she was wholly slumped over the counter, and to crane her neck to look in his direction would be rather uncomfortable, so she continued to stare at the wood grain on the bar. She was beginning to think it was peel-and-stick. She could smooth her fingers over it and feel no divots where the grain was uneven, but that could be the result of a thick varnish, or perhaps a good sanding job, or—no, this was vinyl. It was peeling at the bottom near the corner where the counter met the wall, a little curl of fake wood lifting away from whatever was underneath. She briefly wondered if that was sanitary, and then she wondered why she was wondering that, and then she decided that the amount of alcohol coursing through her system would surely disinfect whatever she might inadvertently ingest, so who was she to care. Not her bar. Not her problem. She was not, tonight, anyone's problem.

His body was warm next to her, and he smelled like cigarettes. It made her chest ache faintly, made her think of college, of bad decisions in good company on fire escapes, of the version of herself that had existed before she’d decided to be so stupidly, recklessly, relentlessly careful all the damn time. The version that had stayed out past two on weeknights and bummed cigarettes off strangers and worn dresses like this one without needing a reason. Man, she could use a cigarette. She hadn't smoked in however long it had been since she decided showing up to court reeking of smoke was a disservice to herself and her clients and the general dignity of the proceedings, which had felt like a very mature and reasonable decision at the time and felt, right now, like one more thing she'd given up in the name of being taken seriously by people who were going to condescend to her regardless. She could really use a cigarette.

"Rough night?"

She looked over. The man, maybe thirty, the kind of forgettable that would take effort to describe afterward. Not threatening. Not particularly anything. He had the look of someone who was also here to be nowhere else, which she understood, which was maybe why she answered at all, or maybe it was just the drinks, or maybe she was just tired of being inside her own head and any voice that wasn't hers would do. He caught the bartender's eye and held up two fingers before Casey had fully processed he was there.

"Something like that," she said, and looked back at her drink.

She was thinking about the way Olivia had said your history with this—and then she wasn't thinking about it because the bar was warm and the music had shifted to something with a low bass line that she could feel more than hear and thinking was becoming somewhat optional.

The bartender set two glasses down. One in front of him. One in front of her. She was looking at the bottles behind the bar, the way they were arranged by height, tallest on the left, and she was thinking about nothing, which she was getting very good at, and then she was looking at her phone for a second—she didn't even know why, muscle memory, the same reflex that made her check it forty times a day—and there was a name on the screen that wasn't Olivia's and she stared at it without reading it and put it back down.

Casey looked at the glass. Looked at him. He lifted his chin slightly. Not quite a smile.

She should say no. She knew that. She was a person who knew things like that, who kept track, who was—

The next thing she would be aware of was light.

It came in sideways from somewhere, too bright, from an angle that meant morning, late morning maybe, and it hit her directly behind the eyes and she made a sound she didn't recognize and turned her face away from it before she was even fully awake, before she knew anything except that the light was unbearable and something was very wrong with her head.

She lay there.

The tile was cold against her cheek. That was—that was a thing. She was on the floor. Her kitchen floor, she thought, she was pretty sure, the grout lines were familiar, she'd spent enough time staring at them while she waited for the coffee to brew. So that was fine. She was on her kitchen floor. People ended up on their kitchen floors. That was a thing that happened.

Her head was the worst it had ever been. She wasn't being dramatic. She was, professionally, a person who tried not to be dramatic, who measured her words carefully and did not exaggerate for effect in professional or personal contexts, and she was telling herself right now as a factual matter that this was the worst her head had ever felt. It wasn't just the pain, though the pain was extraordinary, a deep hot throbbing that went all the way down into her back teeth and made the backs of her eyes feel like they were being pressed outward from the inside. Her scalp felt hot. Sunburned, almost, tender in a way that didn't make any sense. She had a thin high ringing in her ears that didn't change when she pressed her then harder against the floor, that just sat there at a fixed frequency, patient and horrible. Her neck was so stiff she wasn't sure she could lift her head, but she tried anyway.

The room moved. The room moved a lot, actually, swung sideways in a way that had her pressing both palms flat against the tile trying to find something stable, and her stomach lurched and she thought with sudden sharp clarity that she was going to throw up, she was absolutely going to throw up right here on the kitchen floor, and then she held very still and breathed through her nose until the wave passed and left her shaking slightly and not sick, not yet, not if she didn't move again too fast. So she stayed very still.

There was a taste in her mouth that she couldn't identify and didn't want to. Something chemical almost. Something underneath the stale alcohol that wasn't just stale alcohol, that she kept running her tongue against and then wishing she hadn't. She smelled—she smelled wrong. Not just bar smell, not just the particular staleness of a night out, something else underneath it that she couldn't identify and that made her want to shower with an urgency that she dismissed because moving was not currently an option.

Regardless, she pushed herself up onto one elbow, and looked down at her body. Her shoes were gone—she didn't know when she'd taken them off, didn't remember the door or the elevator or any of the ordinary architecture of coming home. Her feet were bare on the tile. She was still in the dress that she'd put on because—she'd had a reason, she'd had a reason that had felt very important at the time and she couldn't—

Olivia.

Right.

She sat up the rest of the way and put her back against the cabinet underneath the sink and pulled her knees up and sat there. The ringing in her ears didn't stop. The light was very bright. She thought about getting up and getting water and didn't move.

She was so stupid. She was so, so stupid. She'd gone out alone dressed like a cheap slut and she'd had too much to drink and she'd ended up on her kitchen floor and she was twenty-eight years old and she was an ADA and she was so profoundly, embarrassingly stupid.

She pressed her back harder against the cabinet and closed her eyes and felt—something. Something that had been background noise became the only thing in the room. Not the kind of ache that comes from sleeping on the hard tile. She knew that ache. She wasn't—well, she couldn’t say she wasn’t stupid—she had a body, she was a person with a body, she knew what that ache meant and where it came from. But she hadn't. She hadn't done that, she hadn't—she'd been at the bar alone, she'd gone there specifically to be alone, she hadn't wanted anyone, she hadn't talked to anyone except the bartender and—there'd been a man. She hadn’t flirted. She hadn’t left with him. She wouldn’t have. She didn’t do that. She'd been thinking about Olivia and the shitty bar and she hadn't—she wouldn't have. She didn't do that. She didn't go home with strangers, she was careful, she was always so careful, she had spent years being so careful, she was the most careful person she knew, she was—

Why would she feel like that if she hadn't —

Why would she —

She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum like that would help anything.

She'd had too much to drink. That was the whole thing. That was the explanation. She'd had too much to drink and she didn't remember getting home and she'd slept on her kitchen floor and her body was—it was always weird after a bad night, that was normal, that happened, that didn't mean—it didn't have to mean—

She is so stupid. She is so incredibly, irredeemably stupid, because what had she thought was going to happen, going out alone like that, dressed like that, drinking like that, she was an ADA, she'd stood in courtrooms and argued cases and she knew, she knew better than almost anyone exactly how this kind of night could go and she'd done it anyway because she was upset about a fight, because her feelings were hurt, because she was apparently a child, because—

Because she deserved to have her feelings hurt, probably. Because this was what happened. This was what happened to women who went out alone and drank until they couldn't remember and sat next to strangers—who let them—

She didn't finish that thought.

She couldn't tell if she was protecting herself or just being a coward. She suspected the latter. She suspected she was very good at being a coward about the things that mattered and very good at performing bravery about everything else, the courtrooms and the arguments and the measured words, all of it a mural to cover something that was apparently just—this. Just her.

A woman on a kitchen floor who didn't know what had happened to her and was already, already, finding ways to make it her fault before she'd even fully understood what it was.

What it was.

Her phone buzzed somewhere above her head and she startled badly, which sent a wave of pain through her skull that made her eyes water, and she sat there for a second just breathing before she reached up and felt along the counter without looking until her fingers closed around it. She turned the screen away from her face because the brightness was unbearable and then looked at it sideways, squinting.

Missed Call—Alex Cabot 11:43 PM

Missed Call—Alex Cabot 11:47 PM

And now Alex Cabot, calling. Right now. She remembered, dimly, the name on the screen at the bar. She must have—she'd done something, called or tried to call or something, and Alex had called back twice and gotten nothing and now it was the next morning and Alex was calling again because that was the kind of person Alex was, which was going to make this so much worse, actually, because now Alex got to know. Now Alex got to find out that Casey Novak had gone out alone and drunk herself into a gap in her own memory and ended up on her kitchen floor. Great. That was great. That was one more person who knew she was an idiot.

She answered it anyway because not answering felt worse somehow.

"Hey." Her voice came out as more of a whimper, which she quickly corrected. "Hey, sorry, I was —"

"Casey." Alex's voice was even, but there was something underneath it that she was trying very hard to keep controlled. "Are you home?"

"Yeah, I'm home." She cleared her throat. Tried to sound like a person who was fine, which she was, she was fine, she was certainly not fine but that was a minor detail, that was neither here nor there. "Did I call you last night? I think I might have pocket-dialed, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to —"

"You called at eleven-forty," Alex said. "You didn't say anything. There was noise and then it cut out. I called back twice."

Casey closed her eyes. So she'd just—breathed at her, apparently. Into the phone. Like a very pathetic obscene caller. Perfect. That was perfect, that was a great addition to the evening's accomplishments, she was doing so well. Let's tally it up, she thought, let's just go ahead and lay it all out. She'd picked a fight with Olivia, or let one happen, or failed to prevent one, however you wanted to categorize it. She'd gone home and put on a dress she had no business wearing anywhere except her own apartment. She'd taken a cab to a bar she'd never been to specifically so no one would find her, which, great call, very smart, gold star for that one. She'd drunk until she couldn't account for herself. She'd apparently called Alexandra fucking Cabot at eleven-forty in the evening and just. breathed at her. And then she'd gotten home somehow, by some mechanism she couldn't access, and she'd ended up on her kitchen floor, and now Alex had called back a third time and Casey had answered it and was sitting here accruing more evidence against herself in real time. She was doing great. She was absolutely doing so great.

"I'm really sorry," she said. "I had too much to drink and I must have—I'm sorry, I didn't mean to worry you."

Which was an understatement, and not even an interesting one. She'd had too much to drink was what you said when you'd had three glasses of wine at a work event and said something mildly embarrassing to a colleague. She'd had too much to drink was not—it didn't cover it, didn't come close to covering it, and she knew that and was saying it anyway because it was the smallest possible container for what she was trying to hand Alex and she was hoping Alex would just take it and not look inside.

"How much is too much?"

Of course. Of course Alex wasn't going to take it. Casey had known Alex for two years and in that time she had never once watched her accept an insufficient answer from anyone, in court or out of it, and she'd still somehow hoped that this would be the exception, that Alex would let her be vague and small about it, that she'd say oh no worries, glad you're okay, talk soon, and hang up and Casey could go back to sitting on her floor in peace. She didn't know why she'd thought that. She didn't know why she kept thinking things that were obviously wrong.

Casey opened her mouth and closed it. "I don't know exactly."

Which was true. Which was the truest thing she'd said so far. She didn't know exactly, she didn't know approximately, she didn't know at all, and saying it out loud to Alex made it more real in a way she hadn't been prepared for, made it sit differently in her chest, heavier, the not knowing suddenly feeling less like a gap and more like an answer she didn't want.

"Do you remember getting home?"

And there it was. The question she'd been hoping most wouldn't get asked, which was stupid, which was so stupid, of course Alex was going to ask that, Alex was the most precise person she'd ever met, Alex didn't ask questions she wasn't already following to their conclusions, Alex had probably known exactly where this conversation was going before Casey even picked up the phone. And now here they were. Alex having to ask her, a grown woman, a licensed attorney, an assistant district attorney, whether she remembered getting herself home from a bar the night before. Whether she'd managed the basic task of existing unsupervised for one evening without something going wrong. She had a law degree. She had a bar license and a caseload and a reputation she'd spent years building and Alex Cabot was on the phone asking her if she remembered getting home like she was checking on a teenager who'd snuck out, which was humiliating, which was exactly as humiliating as it deserved to be, which was—she didn't have a right to be humiliated. Humiliation implied she hadn't earned this. Humiliation implied she had any ground to stand on at all.

"I'm fine," Casey said, which was not an answer. "I have a headache, I just need water and—"

"Casey." Very quiet. "Do you feel okay?"

The ache. Low and specific. She'd been carefully not thinking about it for the last however long and Alex had just walked right up to it in four words.

"I'm fine," she said again, and even she could hear how thin it sounded, how little it was doing, what a terrible job it was doing of convincing anyone of anything. “I’m fine I just—I think I’m being dramatic.”

"I don't think you're being dramatic," Alex said, apparently having decided to say the thing. "I think something happened last night, and I think you need to go to the hospital."

"I don't—Alex, I don't even know if anything—" She stopped. "I don't remember. I don't remember anything after the bar and I know how that sounds but it doesn't mean—it could just be—I was drinking a lot, I was really drinking a lot, so it could just be that I had too much and that's why I don't—" She stopped again. Pressed her fingers against her eyes. "I just. I don't know what you think happened from this conversation. I called you by accident. I got drunk. God forbid. Women get drunk, Alex, it happens, it's not—you can't just tell someone to go to the hospital because they got drunk and pocket-dialed you, that's not—I'm fine. I'm hungover, I just need to drink some water and sleep and I'll be—" She was rambling. She could hear herself rambling, could hear the way the sentences were getting longer and less controlled, which was not helping her case, which was in fact actively undermining the point she was trying to make, which was that she was fine, she was completely fine, there was absolutely no reason for anyone to be concerned, certainly not enough to go to a hospital, certainly not enough for any of this.

She'd just had a bad night, she'd said she'd had too much to drink, which, yes, clearly, obviously, that was not in dispute, but that was—people did that. People had too much to drink and didn't remember things and woke up feeling terrible and it didn't automatically mean—it wasn't automatically—

God forbid, she thought. God forbid a person have a bad night. God forbid she drink too much one time and not have it turn into a whole—into a—

"Casey," Alex said, very gently. "I know."

"I'm probably just being dramatic," she repeated, and her voice came out smaller than she'd meant it to, smaller than she had any interest in it being, and she pressed her hand over her eyes and willed herself to hold it together because she'd already cried once on this floor and she was done, she'd decided she was done, she had made that decision and she was sticking to it.

"You are the least dramatic person I know," Alex said. "Which is why I’m already in my car."

Something in Casey's chest moved in a way she didn't have words for. She wanted to argue with that, wanted to point out that she was currently on her kitchen floor having a breakdown on the phone with someone she barely knew, which seemed pretty dramatic to her, which seemed like it qualified, but she didn't have the energy and she suspected Alex would just dismantle the argument anyway and she was so tired of losing.

"You don't have to—" she started.

"I'm coming," Alex said. Not unkindly. "I'm going to drive you. You don't have to talk in the car if you don't want to. You don't have to talk at all. But I'm coming and I'm taking you and you can be angry at me for it later."

Casey looked at her kitchen. She thought about saying no. She thought about insisting, about being a person who handled things herself because that was what she did, that was the only thing she'd ever reliably done, the one skill she'd never lost even when she'd lost everything else. She thought about saying I'm fine one more time and seeing if it worked any better on the third try. She was so tired. She was so tired and her head was splitting open and she ached everywhere and there was a gap where last night should be and she was just. so tired.

"Okay," she whispered.

"Okay," Alex repeated. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."

Casey nodded even though Alex couldn't see her. She stayed on the floor after Alex hung up, phone in her lap, the screen going dark, and she looked at nothing and she thought about how now Alex knew. Alex knew she was stupid. Alex knew she'd gone out alone and drunk whatever was put in front of her and ended up here, and Alex was coming anyway, and she didn’t know what to do with that. She'd spent so long making sure she wasn't something anyone had to deal with, making sure she took up exactly the right amount of space and no more, and Alex was just coming. Twenty minutes. Like it was simple. Like Casey was worth the twenty minutes.