This isn't weird.

Good Way to Ruin Your Life

A drink. All Noah could think about was having a drink. It had been three years since his last sip of alcohol—not since the day Bitsy was born.

The nine months preceding that were almost entirely spent in a blackout. The news had been more than he could stand. Another one. Another one. Just when he'd nearly worked up the courage to leave her, she was pregnant again. He could count the number of times he'd even slept with her on one hand, none of them sober, and somehow he'd managed to make not one, but two children with that vampire. When she told him, he wanted to lay down and die.

The following day, he got a vasectomy. The following night, he got loaded. The rest was a blur. Until Bitsy was born.

He hadn't been there for Ruthie's birth. For the first five weeks of her life, he refused to even look at her. But his heart thawed in time, when necessity finally left him alone with her, and apparently, that had shaken loose some paternal instinct he'd never thought was there, because when it was time for his second daughter to arrive, it compelled him to be at the hospital, rather than at the bar, like he'd planned. He'd held her even before Rebecca did.

That was what kept him sane. He hated his life, but he loved his daughters. There was no telling how much damage he'd done to Ruthie with his reluctance and drinking through her early years—no doubt, that would rise to the surface when she was older—but he'd tried very hard since then to make up for it. And he'd set aside a small savings account for the express purpose of paying her inevitable therapy bills.

Tonight, though, he was ready to break that three year sobriety streak. Just once. Just to stave off the horror and guilt of what he had just done.

The nearest bar was a dump, dirty and seedy with poor lighting and oddly damp floors. It was depressingly empty, but the sparse patronage suited Noah just fine. A trio of bored college kids throwing darts in the corner, a table of old men playing cards, all rather unobtrusive, save for one couple in a booth that he couldn't actually see, but could very clearly hear. Their conversation was loud and heavily slurred, the woman doing most of the talking, rambling on about an ex-husband. Her unfortunate date contributed only occasionally, and only with the sentiment, "Uh huh. Wow. That sucks," which grew less coherent with every repetition.

There was nobody else sitting at the bar, so he took a seat there. He set his typewriter down on the counter—he couldn't bear to leave it in the car; he needed it now more than ever—and gave his order to a blessedly untalkative bartender who barely grunted in acknowledgement before pouring him a gin and tonic. Noah had never liked the taste of gin and tonic, but he'd very much liked being the type of person who ordered gin and tonic in his early twenties, when he'd cared what the pretentious hipsters in his social circle thought of him. But he didn't particularly like the taste of any other alcohol, either, so he stuck with it out of habit.

The dramatic mental image he'd had of knocking it back in a single gulp and calling for another never came to fruition. All he managed was a tiny sip, followed by a few long moments of staring despondently down at its clear surface, lost in his miserable thoughts.

Camilla...

Was it true, what she had said? Had his abandonment really put her on the street? Trying now to imagine her coming home to find him vanished without a trace, then somehow getting up to go to work the next morning, he felt like a fool. Of course her life had fallen apart. She'd burned through her savings paying their rent after his parents had cut him off, when he was too useless to hold a job. And she'd never had a safety net, a family to fall back on. He knew that. Yet somehow, he'd never put it all together.

No forwarding address?

Of course. Because she hadn't had one.

It was September. Temperatures were just beginning to drop. The first frost had come early that year.