“You’ll forgive me if I don’t make jokes about old times and past friends, but it’s been a while, and you’re the one who left.”
Her face went still, the life leaving it for a moment, just a mask looking back at me for a long, long moment. “I had no choice.”
“I’m a big believer in free will, doll. There’s always a choice. Unless you’re saying someone grabbed you, stuffed you in a box, and dragged the box away. In which case, congratulations on your escape and/or release. Are the cops on your tail?”
“Roger, do not do this.”
“Do what? Treat you like a stranger? Or like a woman who walked out on me, without a word, making me wonder if you were live or dead? That what you mean?”
“It was not like that.”
“It was, I think, exactly like that.”
For being in a big city, it could sure get quiet awfully fast.
I went over to a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of gin, splashed some into a tumbler. After a moment, I threw in some tonic. Old times.

Tonight’s word count is 7,217, of the roughly 6,800 I should be at. I blew off Sunday, but got on a roll today to make up the deficit and get slightly ahead of the game.

Much of what I’ve written is actually pre-the outline I had put together. I decided I needed a flashback as a prologue, and it turned into a 5,800 word mini-adventure. Ah, well — editing comes later.

The second thing is that how my protagonist (Roger, in this chapter) reacts to the situation he finds himself in turned out very different from what I had expected and scribbled down. Better, I think. It gets me to the same spot, and what I’d scribbled in can still happen, but it still amazes me when things veer off in unexpected tangents. It happens, and sometimes it feels spooky, but it’s almost always a good thing.

Feeling good so far.