He looked up when she arrived. Up close, she revised her read slightly — not just tired. Specifically, carefully tired. The kind that comes from trying to hold something together that has come apart.
"What can I get you," she said.
Not a question — she had long ago dropped the upward inflection. It came out as an invitation instead, which landed differently.
He looked at the shelf behind her. Not reading it — thinking. "Whisky," he said. "Something that earns it."
She looked at him for one second. "Neat or with one stone?"
"One stone."
She turned and selected without hesitating — a twelve-year single malt from the second shelf, the one she recommended to people who wanted something with weight to it but not punishment. She poured it, dropped in a single large ice cube, and set it in front of him on a paper coaster.
He looked at it. Then at her. "Good choice?"
"For tonight," she said. "Yes."
Something in his face shifted slightly — not quite a smile, but the territory adjacent to one. He picked up the glass and drank, slowly, and she watched him let out a breath he had probably been holding since whenever his day had gone wrong.
She went back to her lemons.
She was not hovering. She had learned in year one that the worst thing you could do with a person at the end of a hard day was hover. You stayed close enough to be available and far enough away to be undemanding. You let the bar do its work — the low light, the music, the specific permission of being somewhere that expected nothing from you.
The record playing was Chet Baker. Almost Blue. She had put it on at eleven without planning to and was now glad she had.