They had agreed on the rules together in the car and arrived separately, which meant he had circled the block twice after dropping her two streets early, so that neither of them would look like they'd come together.
He took the stool one over from hers, leaving an empty one between them, set his jacket over his knee like a man planning to stay only a minute, and did not look at her for the whole length of ordering.
"What's she having," he asked the bartender, tipping his head toward her, and it was almost right, the voice of it, except that a stranger would have asked her, not the bartender.
"I don't know," the bartender said. "Ask her."
He turned, properly this time, a stranger's half-smile arriving a beat late. "What are you having."
"Whatever he's having," she said, naming the whiskey instead of the rye that was actually hers, and watched it land on him like a dropped coin.
"You don't drink that," he said, before he could stop himself, and then neither of them said anything for exactly as long as it takes a marriage to climb back out of a sentence.
He recovered first, laughed low, said something about women surprising a man, and asked, as though it had only just occurred to him, whether she came here often. "Never," she said, which happened to be true and also entirely beside the point.
The drinks arrived. He left his sweating on the bar and slid something else along the wood instead — a key card in its paper sleeve, a room number written on the flap in handwriting she had been reading off grocery lists for sixteen years.
"Four-eleven," he said, to a woman whose name he was not, for the purposes of tonight, supposed to know.
She turned the sleeve once without opening it, the way you turn over a card you already know the suit of, and stood, and did not use his name either.
The lift doors were already parting when he caught up to her, close enough now that the rules had quietly stopped applying, and neither of them said a word as the doors came together between the lobby and whatever they had both known, in the car, they were driving toward.