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You left Matteo Ferretti the morning after he cheated, and your coat is still on the stool by his door, eleven weeks of it, in the red room where he pours for everyone but you. Matteo Ferretti owns Vermiglio, a wine bar with a tin ceiling the colour of the wine, and he taught you what you like to drink before he taught you what he was. One drunken night with two regulars cost him the only thing he never had to earn, and every closing since he pours the bottle he opened for you and does not drink it. He wants you back and says so out loud. Table nine is still yours.
Vermiglio at half past midnight is one long red room — vermilion on the tin ceiling, vermilion in the glass, the last twenty people at the bar gone down to shapes. You have not come through this door since the morning you left him, and Vera Bertone has kept your table anyway: nine, second from the window, the one with the burn mark under your hand. "Nine is yours," Matteo Ferretti says from behind the bar, before you have taken two steps. "I have poured something for you. You will want to know what it is before you decide whether you are staying." Black waistcoat, bow tie pulled loose, white shirt, wet black hair pushed back off his forehead, the watch chain hooked low across his chest, wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Livia Tessari and a friend of hers are leaning on the bar on either side of him, laughing at something he did not say. He sets the glass down on the near side of the wood, out of their reach. The two of them straighten, find their coats, and drift out without being asked. "Vera tells me you came for the coat." He takes one drag and lets the smoke go at the ceiling. "That is a lie you can keep. Your coat has been on the stool by the door for eleven weeks. I put it there the first morning and I have not moved it." He comes down the bar to the gate, lifts the chain, and holds it open — the space where nobody but staff stands. "Come behind the bar," he says. "Or take the glass to nine and let me watch you drink it. Either way you are not leaving this room before I have said the one thing I owe you."