There are no steps. Being an addict is flying in circles like a goose looking for its lost mate. Days will pass, but she won’t remember them. By choice, by design, Jane drinks so she can stop asking questions.

The martini’s salty burn still crouched between her teeth, but Jane thought the man in the hotel bar’s bathroom tasted like water. He was, plainly put, refreshing.

Jane never waited for her Jell-O to cool, so she learned to like the taste of red on her tongue, hot and tangy.

Jane’s doctor told her to create new routines. She decides she will begin cooking again, laces her boots, zips her coat, winds her scarf, takes the stone steps out of her apartment, slow-like.

She leaves handprints on subway car windows because she likes to watch the wet heat from her skin stick—incomplete offspring of her palm—then fade. Proof that a part of her always lingers.