With the jet lag, plus the vodka lemons, and all the party chaos going on around me, I had no idea what time of night it was anymore. Brenda and Steve's crowd had taken me into some kind of VIP section of the club, a roped-off area lined with circular lounge couches, separated by thick, heavy red cords that nobody but us seemed to have access to. The bar where Pablo worked was off to the left, just on the other side of th...

By eight p.m., it was already dark in the city, and unlike so many other places in the world, this one hadn't let up for a second. The chaos of neon signs, motorcycles, and half-wrecked trucks spun an endless loop where you couldn't tell when the day began or the night ended. After Brenda dropped me off outside the hotel, a grimy old building with hardly any rooms that I'd found on some sketchy online deal a month ago , i...

Three years and eight months. That's how long it had been since I'd last seen Pablo in person. And yet I remembered everything. My screaming, my reproaches, that silence when he closed the apartment door. He did it slowly, not trying to make it a scene, which somehow made it worse. It was all still so vivid it could have been last week. I could have followed him down the stairs, stopped him before he got in that Uber. I c...