She waited until he left, then moved the Rhône to sit among the Burgundies.
In the morning she watched from the back. He came in stamping rain from his shoes, set his bag on the counter, and stopped. His coat was still on. His eyes went to the shelf.
“Jaboulet,” he said. “Bottom shelf.”
She said nothing. He slid it back.
That was November. By January the game had rules neither of them had stated. She moved one bottle each night after close, always to a shelf where it didn’t belong but could argue for itself — a Malbec among the Cabernet Francs, or a Crémant nudged into the Champagne. He found it before his first coffee.
The morning he missed one, she almost didn’t believe it. She’d tucked a Vinho Verde behind the Muscadet — close enough to be subtle, different enough to be wrong. He walked past it. Came back from the stockroom, walked past it again.
She left it for three days.
On the fourth morning he pulled it, studied the label, and set it back where it actually went.
“That wasn’t one of yours,” he said.
“What?”
“Someone shelved it there. A customer, maybe.”
She thought about this for the rest of the day. He hadn’t missed it. He’d known it wasn’t hers. The misplacement had a different signature — not wrong in the way she was wrong, which was always a question. Wrong in the way a mistake is wrong, which is just noise.
He was tracking her logic, not the catalog.
After close she stood in front of the Portuguese section and didn’t move anything. It was the first night in eleven weeks. In the morning he came in, stopped, looked at the shelves. Looked at all of them. Then he looked at her.
“Nothing?” he asked.
She handed him his coffee.
He put his coat on the hook. For a moment they stood in the shop with its correct shelves and its thousands of bottles and the rain on the windows, and neither of them moved anything at all.