“Making women happy through something on your phone? One billion, easy.”

“There’s no thing to make women happy. Happiness is the thing.”

“Well,” the barman says, “maybe it’s a thing you have to feed once a week with a no-reason email.”

She laughs, if you can call it that. “It doesn’t have a sex schedule but I already know it, Fridays and Tuesdays plus the weekend if we go out.”

She finishes her drink. Martin takes the glass before she breaks it, probably. “OK.”

“Best sex I ever had,” she says.

“Well, that’s good.”

“Of course, I had some really terrible sex experiences.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s better now, right?”

“I want more of it,” she says, but with her purse open and her pointing at the rye so it’s clear she means the drink. “I know I’m terrible,” she tells him. “I should be condemned. I should be prosecuted. I just get scared of things and they trample all over all the happy things I’m trying to—” her hands tinker in the air “—stack up, I guess I would say, so I can enjoy them.”

“Enjoyment is good,” Martin says. Her unhappiness is starting to feel jinxy to him, a cloud over his business when business is bad enough.

“It’s my own fault. I stomp all over things like a horse with a scary neck.”

“I think,” Martin says, “that’s enough drink for you now, because what are you talking about?”

“I should be dead.”

Reynard slips in. They both look up, bride and barman, and for a second remember him and for a second don’t. His face alters, narrows and grows hair, fine and wild, his eyes driven and untrustworthy, his fingernails long and filthy and then just normal. The effect is not ghastly, just ghostly, so now he’s simply a stranger in the bar who feels, certainly but unprovably, up to no good. Rachel shudders slightly. Reynard sits down on the neighboring stool and disrobes a little. His cloak is just as evil when he takes it off.

“Evening,” Martin says.

Reynard looks at his watch—which he beat a man for—and at the door at the fogginess. “Not quite yet.”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” Martin says, the standard barman line.

“Indeed,” Reynard says, and his eyes slide off to the chalkboard drinks list. He purses his lips at the choices. His teeth move about and Rachel is watching them. She licks her lips.

“Sazerac for me,” he says, “and one for the lady if she’ll join me.”

Martin glances at his shelves, flips an empty bottle. “That drink has Peychaud’s in it. I’ll need to go down back for a minute.”

“That was by design,” Reynard not-jokes, and then, his eyelid precise as a guillotine, winks at Rachel. “Wasn’t it, deario?”