"The jury's out." She turned her glass in a small circle on the bar. "It's where I landed. Landing somewhere and living there are two different activities, but the rent doesn't care which one you're doing." She leaned over and held out a hand. "Jess."
"Daemon."
"Course it is." She grinned at whatever my face did. "Relax, it's a good name. You either grow into a name like that or you get buried under it."
We talked about nothing for a while. The bartender's haircut. The jukebox's limited range. The pool league and its politics. She was good at nothing-talk the way some people are, keeping the ball in the air without apparent effort.
"What do you do?" I asked.
"Now? Front-of-house manager at a winery. Weekends and weddings." She picked at the corner of her beer label. "Before, I ran an events company. Weddings, corporate, festival catering in the summer." A small shrug. "In Bend."
I knew Bend. I'd never set foot in the town, but I'd seen the name printed on one of Malakai's handouts, sitting third on a list of three. Something in my chest changed gears.
"You said ran. Past tense."
"It's true. I said that." She looked at me a second longer, recalibrating, the way people do when small talk stops being small. "We sold." She followed this with a derisive snort. "Coming up on two years ago."
"Who to?"
“A national outfit. Stole the business right out from under me.”
"Elevate?" I said, and when her eyebrows shot up, I added. "They're in my town right now."
“Huh. Small world.”
She said nothing for a spell. Then she signaled the bartender for two more, lifted her jacket off the stool beside her, and nodded at it.
"Sit down, Daemon from Coogan's Break," she said. "Let me tell you how the movie ends."
It started, she said, with a complaint to the Health Department.
"Six years, never so much as a warning. Then one Tuesday there's an inspector in my kitchen holding allegations so specific it was like someone had walked through with a clipboard."
She turned her glass. "Cleared in three weeks. Didn't matter. Word on the street was already moving. Then licensing got a letter. Then our two anchor clients got friendly phone calls from somebody concerned about our stability. Concerned. That was the word both times."
"Then the offer," I said.
"Then the offer." She nodded slowly. "Polite as a tide. They don't push, you know. They arrange the water level and wait."
"Anything physical? Sabotage?"
"Nothing we could prove. Although three weeks out from our biggest wedding of the season, our refrigeration contractor stopped answering his phone. To this day I can't tell you whether that was them or my own luck."
She tipped her bottle toward me. "That's the elegant part. After a while, you can't tell which problems are yours and which are manufactured. Soon enough you're flinching at all of them."
I thought about a figure in generic whites finding the right switch on an industrial fridge. I drank my beer instead of answering.
"How long did you fight?"
"I fought the whole time. But I was on my own." The label came off her bottle in one piece. She smoothed it flat on the bar, taking more care over it than it needed.
"Russ. My partner. Both kinds. He did the books, I did everything else. Somewhere around the second complaint, he ran the numbers and decided we'd already lost. He never said it like that. What he said was that he was protecting us. Protecting me, protecting our staff, protecting whatever we'd get to walk away with."
She looked at the flattened label. "By the time I found out he'd been taking their calls, the conversation was mostly over. He'd negotiated the surrender before I knew the battle had a date."
"And you signed."
"What was I going to do, buy him out with money we didn't have, mid-siege?" She said it without heat, an old argument worn smooth from handling. "I signed. Our relationship lasted four months past the closing. Turns out the company was the thing we were, and once it was gone, we were two people with opposite definitions of protecting each other."
