“Restart,” Ben says, as the liquor greets her tongue. It’s flowery at first, but that’s just a soft glove over the punch of the tequila. It’s a version of their wedding drink, she realizes, tequila and rosewater and lime, not as fancy as the original but still delicious and special. It’s called something, but at Restart the movie chases away the name of the thing. V4U is voice-controlled, one of its selling points, a network of film and television that gets smarter, or not smarter but more familiar, more like you, the more you talk and converse at it. A young child’s demands, Ben repeated from the meeting where they gave it to him, for the same thing over and over, or for something dreamed up entirely, can be granted in seconds, gratifying parents and silencing homes so wondrously there’s half-joking talk of renaming it Deus Ex Machina. Rachel and Ben haven’t shown it to Nicky. They’ve only shown it to themselves, to each other, indulging in the movies that brought them, with hilarious dialogue and plots so slow there’s plenty of time for kissing, to courtship years ago. It’s a grandiose vampire movie tonight, in lurid color and music, and it’s been paused at the moment when the innkeeper has just found rice in their luggage and realizes our heroes are honeymooners.

The plot moves forward lugubriously, slowed down by bodices and moody piano playing. Rachel keeps sipping. The innkeeper’s wife is hiding something, little items that make her cry when she opens the cupboard, and Ben thinks, darkly and fleetingly, of his own shoved-away stash. He’d stopped by Bottle Grove some time ago and asked for the recipe for the cocktail Martin had cooked up at their wedding. It was a pretext to check up on his wife. Her Trail kept stalling at the bar, like a footprint in the snow, the tracks of an idea that his wife’s wanderings were actually, materially, unfaithful. Walking home he saw them walking, his own wife and his kid’s own toothy teacher, and Ben found a new ruthless streak, fed by his rise in the court of the Vic. He made the call, conned up a crime. He said it as clearly as he could, that Reynard had assaulted his daughter.