The woman with the clipboard was there as usual, and each time that Jackie took a sip the woman would write something down. She appeared to be working with a woman with an earpiece standing outside, as she would occasionally wave wildly to her, and the other woman would wave wildly back, and then they would quickly and nonchalantly look away, loudly whistling and saying, “I don’t know that person. If you asked me to define a stranger, I’d say that lady. Couldn’t know her less.”

Jackie looked back at the kitchen, and there was the man again: blond, handsome in all of the expected ways (and in this way not handsome), staring at her and flipping endless amounts of burgers into the air, a fountain of burgers with a meat-splash pattern in a five-foot radius around him.

She hopped up from the stool. The woman with the clipboard started writing frantically on the clipboard, and Laura said, “Hey, Jackie, where you going?” but couldn’t get up because her branches were caught in the ice cream freezer door.

Jackie ran to the back, where the steel swinging doors of the kitchen were. She slammed through them into a kitchen with no one in it. All the burgers were still there, evidence of the man’s recent existence.

She walked slowly past the prep table, stopping to look under it, where the pans and plates were stored. No one.

There was no back door that she could see. He had to be in here.

A soft clank. Some hanging spatulas moving. She crept toward them, looking around at the large dishwashing sink and the cold storage room.

The cold storage room. A heavy magnetized door. Was it slightly ajar?

She reached out her hand, slowly, so slowly. Fingers around the handle. The kitchen was empty and silent. No one out in the diner seemed to be watching. Even the woman with the clipboard had returned to her usual business of marking off new entrances. She was alone and no one would help her if anything went wrong.

“Story of my life,” she said, and flung open the magnetized door. Shelves of meat and produce, nothing else. There was nowhere she could see to hide.

A crash from behind her. The blond man pushed away the pile of plates he had been hiding behind in a shout of broken ceramics. She tore after him, and they both slammed through the steel swinging doors. She was just behind him as they weaved through tables and surprised customers.

The clipboard woman was adding something up on her clipboard, mouthing the equations as she went, apparently uninterested in the chase.