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Colton. But he also smiled at the thought that in a room full of nudes, lazy grammar grabbed his attention the most.
    A hand squeezed his shoulder, firm yet not too much. “Are you taking dances tonight, honey?”
    A petite girl in her early twenties leaned on his chair. She wore a long wig and green contacts with black pupils that made her eyes seem as cold as alligator’s. Nonetheless, her small bra and frail frame reminded him of Sarah. Underneath the makeup, the girl might have been pretty. He wasn’t sure where to put his eyes.
    “I charge four hundred, not three – that all right?” Through her alligator eyes, Colton saw how out of place he must look. A nube or not, he wasn’t going to let a girl half his age take him for a fool.
    “Sorry,” he said with a short stammer, “I can only do three.” The girl didn’t flinch, maybe she didn’t hear.
    “But it’s a three-for-one deal, honey.” Each honey-ending sentence slapped Colton’s face like a dead fish.
    “Plenty of other folks here would take you up on this.”
    She rolled her eyes and moved to the next table – a rowdy group wearing orange hardhats. Colton stood straighter in the chair. His Sprite came back accompanied by another “honey,” this time from the waitress. He held the paper cup with both hands, sipped on the diluted soda and looked in the eyes of the next dancer to come on stage, wishing she weren’t naked. Why did he think strippers could replace Sarah? Another squeeze on his shoulder, same place and strength. He turned.
    “What if I do it for three hundred, honey?” Alligator eyes must have struck out with the Home Depot crew.
    “Wouldn’t do that to you.”
    She grimaced. “Then how come you haven’t taken a dance from anyone else?”
    So Déjà Vu monitored his dance orders too? He wondered what analytics system they must have installed here. “You’re the first one who asked.”
    “You want me to send another girl?”
    His head shook. “No. I was leaving.” Colton gulped the last of the Sprite from the sweaty paper cup and rose from the plastic chair. What would Sarah have said if she saw him here? What would she think? Yet another “honey” hit him within two steps.
    “No refill,” he said, “I’m leaving.”
    “I wasn’t offering one and didn’t mean to stop you.”
    Colton turned and saw a blonde with a pierced lower lip.
    “Or I could talk like this if you prefer,” she said with a fake British accent, then pulled two chairs and sat in one of them.

two years and three hundred twenty nine days till defiance day (9
    Sylvya hung her scrubs and shut her locker for the day. She pressed the down button on the elevator and looked down the quiet row of patient rooms along the corridor. All doors closed, no clattering of heels or squeaking of equipment wheels. The fifth floor was dozing off like a senior taking a long nap.
    David and the kids were waiting at home. Dallas was going to babble about how he was adjusting to the new grade at school and Sadie was going to pester her to knit together, before Sylvya had taken off her shoes, and cuddle at her side with eyes gobbling every turn of Sylvya’s knitting hooks.
    Sure, Sylvya would have to tolerate David’s presence for five minutes and hide in her study, as if doing chores, until he left the apartment. But on a positive note, since moving out of their old house, both David and the past were loosening their grip on her, one day at a time. Sylvya had spent too much of her precious life in that house. The furniture dings, the colors when you walked in, or the fast food in the fridge had served as constant reminders of the years she would never get back. She hated that house, even with the kids, and would take them to Chuck E. Cheese or hunker down at the Starbucks across the street, after work. But she had started to heal in the new apartment.
    As the hospital elevator buzzed open, she hesitated and didn’t walk in. What if she checked on the patient in Room