“Sir,” Leo said softly. “I’m going to need you to trust me for three minutes.”

“Drink it slow,” Leo said.

The next night, a woman in a raincoat sat at the far end of the bar, staring at her hands. Leo caught Elara’s eye. She tilted her head toward the locked cabinet.

The hardest part of the repack was always the mental defragmentation. He had to take the insults from the drunk regular, the overtipped smile from the woman trying to get a free round, and the sheer exhaustion of being on his feet for ten hours, and he had to compress them. He had to pack them down into a small, dense box in the back of his mind, burying them deep so that tomorrow, when the sign flickered back to "Open," his face would be a fresh slate.