The knob turned easy, no catch, no resistance, like the door had been waiting for him to stop being a coward. Georgia pulled it open and the corridor came at him in a wash of fluorescent light and fryer smell, the bulb overhead steady now, the way it always was, and there was nobody there. Just the long green corridor, the scuffed tiles, the kitchen pass at the far end with a coffee cup still steaming on the shelf, a thin ribbon of vapor going up and vanishing into the heat of the room.

He stood in the doorway a second longer than he needed to, listening. The fryer hissed somewhere back in the kitchen, steady and indifferent, the way it hissed every afternoon. From the dining room came the low clatter of silverware and the murmur of the lunch crowd thinning out, a chair scraping, a man laughing at something that wasn't funny. Ordinary. All of it ordinary. Whatever had been on the other side of that door had walked away, and Georgia had the strange, hollow feeling of having been spared something he couldn't name.

"Told you," Dolly said behind him, and her hand landed flat on the small of his back, warm through the cotton of his dress, her fingers curling just slightly, gathering the fabric and letting it go. Not steering him. Just there. Possessive, the way she touched him when she wanted him to remember whose he was.

He stepped out into the corridor and let the door swing shut behind him, the latch clicking soft. His skirt had ridden up again during everything, the hem sitting high on his thigh where it didn't belong, and he reached back and tugged it down with two fingers, the way he'd done a hundred times, a small private chore that had become as automatic as checking his apron strings. The apron itself was a problem. The wet spot was still there, a dark patch low on the white cotton, glistening under the corridor lights, and it had spread while they'd stood in the closet, the damp creeping outward in a slow irregular shape that no amount of thumbing was going to hide.

Dolly came out after him and stopped beside the door, and she tugged her bodice straight with both hands, a quick efficient shove that settled her breasts back where the uniform wanted them. Her stiletto clicked once on the tile as she shifted her weight, a small sharp sound in the quiet corridor, and Georgia found himself listening for it again, the click, like a metronome, like she was counting time until someone caught them.

She looked at his apron. Her mouth did something complicated, half a smirk and half a wince, and she reached over and gave the wet patch a useless little flick with her thumbnail, like that might make it disappear.

"You're gonna have to change that before the dinner rush," she said. "Or at least turn it around. You look like you've been bobbing for apples in the dish pit."

"It's not that bad."

"Georgia." She said his name the way she said it when she was about to be right. "It's a wet spot on your crotch, honey. It's not subtle."

He looked down at it. She was right. The patch had a shine to it, the cotton soaked through in the middle and darkening toward the edges, and if any customer looked at him for more than a second they'd see it and they'd know, and knowing was the whole problem. He hooked his thumbs under the apron strings at his waist and started to untie them, meaning to turn the thing around, and that was when he heard the heel.

Not Dolly's. Dolly's was a quick flat click, brown pump on tile, businesslike. This one was slower. Measured. A heel that knew it was being heard and liked the sound of itself, coming around the corner from the dining room, and Georgia's hands froze on the apron strings and his whole body went still the way a rabbit goes still, though he'd have denied it if anyone asked.

Ruby Maynard came around the corner with a tray balanced on her hip, and the light caught her the way light caught things it was built for. The red and yellow of her dress glowed in the corridor fluorescents, the fabric stretched low across her chest so the dark brown valley of her cleavage showed deep and unashamed, and the short wrap of the skirt fanned out from her hips with every step she took, the brown heels lifting and settling on the tile. A small red flower sat pinned in her natural curls, just above her ear, and it moved a little when she moved, the only soft thing about her.

She stopped dead.

Her eyes went straight to Georgia's apron. Not to his face, not to Dolly, not to the closed storage door behind them with its still-turned lock. Straight to the wet spot, low on the white cotton, still damp and shining, and she looked at it for a long second, long enough that Georgia felt the heat climb up his neck and settle in his ears. Then her gaze came up slow, past the apron, past the hem of his short blue skirt, up the length of him, and landed on his face.

And she smiled. Slow. Wide. The kind of smile that had already decided something and was just enjoying the walk to the conclusion.

"Well," Ruby said. She shifted the tray to her other hip, thumbing the strap, the motion easy and unhurried, and she tilted her head at them both, the red flower dipping with the tilt. "Hazel sent me to check the storage. Said she heard something in there earlier, wanted to make sure nothing got knocked over."

She glanced at the door behind them. The lock was on the outside, and it was still turned, and Georgia saw her see it, saw the little flicker of understanding cross her face and settle into something warmer, something with teeth.

"But I reckon," she said, "you two found what you were looking for."

Georgia's throat had gone dry. He could feel Dolly beside him, gone quiet and still in a way that wasn't like her, and he knew without looking that she was watching Ruby the way she watched a customer who might cause trouble, weighing her, deciding. The fryer hissed back in the kitchen. The coffee cup on the pass kept steaming, the ribbon of vapor rising and thinning and rising again, and nobody in the corridor said a word.

"Storage is fine," Dolly said finally, and her voice came out flat and easy, the voice she used on drunks and cops and men who thought they were owed something. She stepped half in front of Georgia, not obviously, just a shift of her hip and her shoulder, the way she'd done a hundred times without ever admitting she did it. "Nothing got knocked over. You can tell Hazel that."

Ruby's smile didn't move. She looked at Dolly, then back at Georgia, and the tray tilted a little in her grip, the edge of it catching the light, and Georgia noticed for the first time that there was nothing on it. No plates, no cups, no coffee ring. Just an empty tray, carried the way you carried a tray when the tray was an excuse to walk somewhere.

"Mm," Ruby said. "I'll tell her that." She didn't move. She stood there in the middle of the corridor with her empty tray and her low-cut dress and her red flower, and she looked at the two of them the way a cat looks at a windowsill it's already decided to sit on. "You know, I been here three days now. Three days, and I ain't seen the inside of that storage closet one time. Hazel keeps it locked up tight as a bank."

Georgia's hands were still frozen on his apron strings. He became aware of them, of the way his thumbs were hooked under the cotton, of how obvious it was that he'd been about to untie the thing, and he let go and let his arms fall to his sides and tried to look like a man who had not just been caught doing anything at all. It didn't work. He could feel it not working, the way you feel a lie settle wrong on your own face.

Ruby took a step closer. Just one, the brown heel clicking soft on the tile, and the tray tilted a little more, and her mouth opened, and the corridor went very quiet, the fryer and the coffee cup and the far-off clatter of the dining room all dropping away until there was nothing in the world but the three of them and whatever Ruby Maynard was about to say.

"Y'all keep standing there like you're waiting on a bus," Ruby said, "I'm gonna start charging admission." She let the tray settle against her hip and looked at Georgia's apron one more time, unhurried, the way you look at a price tag you already know you can afford. "Hazel wanted me to check the storage. I checked. Door's locked, floor's clear, nothing knocked over." She drew the last two words out slow, tasting them. "Nothing at all."

Dolly's jaw worked once, the way it did when she was deciding whether to fight or laugh, and she landed on the laugh, a short breath through her nose that didn't reach her mouth. She reached over and caught Georgia's apron strings herself, two fingers, and tugged the bow loose with a quick practiced pull, then turned the whole apron around his hips like she was dressing a child who'd spilled his milk. The wet patch went to the back, out of sight, and she smoothed the clean cotton flat across his front with the heel of her hand, patting it twice. "There," she said, to Ruby, not to him. "Good as new."

Ruby watched the whole operation with her head tilted, the red flower riding the tilt, and when Dolly's hand came off the clean cotton she let out a low sound, not quite a laugh, more like a woman settling into a good chair. "Good as new," she repeated, and she said it the way you'd repeat a price back to a salesman you weren't done haggling with. "Uh-huh."

The apron hung flat across Georgia's front now, white and unmarked, and he could feel the difference in the air — the evidence gone, the lie intact, and Ruby Maynard standing there with her empty tray and her eyes that had already done the arithmetic. He pressed his palm flat against the clean cotton, the way Dolly had, feeling for any damp that had bled through, and there wasn't any. She'd done it right. She always did it right.

Dolly crossed her arms under her chest and let her weight settle onto one hip, and the brown pump clicked once more on the tile, that metronome Georgia couldn't stop hearing. She wasn't going to say anything else. He knew that posture — chin level, mouth soft, eyes flat and patient. It was the same way she stood at the counter when a trucker got loud about his eggs. She'd said her piece and now she'd wait, and Ruby could do whatever Ruby was going to do.

Ruby lowered the tray. She did it slow, both hands, until the edge came to rest against her thigh, and the empty surface of it caught the overhead light and threw a pale rectangle up onto the wall behind her, wavering when she breathed. "You know what I noticed my first day?" she said, and she wasn't looking at Dolly now. She was looking at Georgia, at his face, at the place just under his jaw. "Everybody in this diner touches each other. Little touches. A hand on a shoulder. Somebody's hip against somebody's at the pass. I thought, huh. Friendly place."

Georgia felt his neck go hot where she was looking, and he had the sudden, crawling certainty that there was something there to see. He didn't know what. He couldn't check without checking, without lifting his own hand to the spot and giving it away, and so he stood still and let her look, and the fryer hissed, and the coffee cup steamed, and Ruby's eyes stayed right where they were, patient as a cat at a mouse hole.

She shifted her weight, one brown heel to the other, and the movement brought her a half-step sideways, out of the middle of the corridor, so that the three of them now stood in a loose triangle instead of a line. It wasn't a big change. It was the kind of change a person made when they'd decided to stay a while, and Georgia's stomach dropped a little at the sight of it.

Ruby's nostrils flared, just slightly, just once — the small involuntary thing a person does when they walk into a room and the room smells like something. Her mouth curved. "Y'all been in that closet a minute," she said. "I can smell it from here. Don't take a bloodhound." She said it easy, no accusation in it, the way you'd comment on the weather or the price of gas. "Sweet and kind of — heavy. Like a hot afternoon."

Dolly's arms stayed crossed. Nothing moved in her face. But Georgia, standing close enough to feel it, caught the smallest shift in her breathing — a beat held a fraction long before it let go — and he knew she'd heard the same thing he had. Ruby wasn't guessing. Ruby had already put it together in the first second she came around that corner, and everything since had just been her enjoying the walk.

Georgia swallowed, and his throat made a small dry click he was sure both women heard. He wanted to say something. He had no idea what. Every sentence he reached for either admitted it or insulted her, and Ruby Maynard was standing there with her low neckline and her red flower and her empty tray, waiting to see which one he'd pick, and the longer he waited the more the silence did the talking for him.

She lifted one hand off the tray and smoothed the fabric of her dress where it stretched across her hip, a slow, absent motion, the yellow and red of it shifting under the fluorescent light, and Georgia caught himself watching her hand and hated himself for it and watched anyway. She noticed. Of course she noticed. Her eyes came up to his, and the smile got a little wider, a little warmer, and she let her hand drop back to the tray without hurrying it.

Somewhere behind the kitchen pass a stack of plates came down on a counter with a flat ceramic crack, and a man's voice called something indistinct, and neither of them turned. The coffee cup kept steaming. The fryer kept hissing its steady indifferent hiss. Everything in the diner was going on exactly as it always went on, and here in this corridor the three of them stood frozen in a moment that had nothing to do with any of it.

"You gonna stand there sniffing us all afternoon," Dolly said, "or you got a point?" Her voice was still flat, still easy, but Georgia heard the edge under it, the thing she only let out when she was done being patient. She hadn't uncrossed her arms. She hadn't moved her hip from in front of him.

Ruby laughed. It was a real one this time, low and quick, and it moved her shoulders and made the flower bob against her curls. "There she is," she said, to nobody, to the corridor. "I was wondering how long that'd take." She looked at Dolly, and something passed between them that Georgia couldn't read — two women taking each other's measure and finding it interesting. "I got a point. I always got a point. I'm just taking my time getting to it, is all."

She leaned in, just slightly, the tray still against her thigh, and dropped her voice like she was telling a secret she didn't mind being overheard. "Hazel don't know," she said. "Whatever's going on back there, she don't know. I heard her this morning telling the fry cook she was gonna get to the bottom of that storage closet one of these days. She said it like a joke. She didn't mean it like one."

Georgia's blood went cold in a way the corridor heat couldn't touch. Hazel. The clipboard. The rap on the door that had frozen them in the dark with their hands still on each other. He'd spent the whole time on the other side of that door telling himself it was nothing, that whoever had knocked had walked away, that they'd gotten lucky. And now Ruby Maynard was standing in front of him saying the words out loud, and luck had a shape all of a sudden, and the shape was a woman who was going to get to the bottom of it.

Ruby straightened up again and settled the tray more comfortably against her hip, and the flower rode back into place above her ear, and she looked at the two of them the way a person looks at a hand of cards they've already decided to play. She hadn't moved toward the dining room. She hadn't moved toward the door. She stood exactly where she was, in the middle of the corridor, and she let the silence sit there, thick and warm, and waited for one of them to fill it.