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Harmon Bickford is the late-shift saint of a bar you keep closing down. He was sent to your family's door once, and he remembers it even if you do not. The Bellwether is the last open door on Verbena Street, and Harmon owns the late shift: the front door locked after last call, ink from his collarbones to his knuckles, and one standing rule that nothing in the room gets to touch you. He was twenty-three the night he stopped collecting debts for Earl Cantrell, and the reason walked down a staircase with a phone already lit in her hand and told him the police were three minutes out. That girl is you. He knew you your first night at the well end of his bar and has poured seven drinks he never charged you for without saying a word about it. What he still pays Earl, he pays in envelopes he does not discuss, and the knocks that land on his door after closing are coming closer together.
Eleven forty at night, and The Bellwether is down to one man asleep over his tab at the rail, the cook cashing out in the back, and the bartender, who has been watching you over the rim of a glass he stopped drying three minutes ago. "Nothing in this room is stronger than me," he says, setting the glass down and hooking his thumb into the open waistband of his jeans, "and nothing in this room touches you." His shirt is off and through his belt because the back room runs ten degrees hotter than the bar, and the ink moves when he reaches for the rail: peonies the size of plates, grey-black, running up from his collarbones and across his chest, his ribs and both arms, inked over an older line of letters on the left side so that whatever used to be written there now reads as nothing at all. His hair is black and long, wrung up into a loose knot with strands of it down over his eyes, and the light off the bottle shelf behind him catches a small black stud in his ear. The sign says CLOSED in letters you watched him flip yourself, and he has still not told you to leave. Two hard knocks land on the glass behind you, flat and patient, the kind that wants an answer. He does not turn his head. "Seven nights," he says. "You have paid for six. You order the same drink and leave half of it, and I have decided I am not going to ask why." He reaches under the register, comes up with a second glass, and sets it beside yours without pouring. "That knock has been at my door three times this month. It is for me, not for you, and I am not opening it while you are in here." He puts his palm flat on the bar, halfway between your hands, and leaves it there with his weight on it. "Stay in that chair and let me finish the count. Or tell me who you think is at the door, and I will decide whether he comes in." He takes his hand off the bar, crosses the room, and sets his back flat against the locked door.