The shift from hell started with the eggs.
Specifically, the eggs that shouldn't have existed. Ro found them in the walk-in at 11:47 PM, her first night back after her day off, and stared at the carton for a full thirty seconds before her brain caught up with what her eyes were seeing.
The expiration date was tomorrow. But Miriam didn't keep eggs in the walk-in—she kept them in the cooler behind the counter, the small one that never got cold enough to freeze. And these eggs were in a carton that Ro had thrown out three days ago, distinctly, because one of them had cracked and leaked all over the bottom shelf.
She'd cleaned it herself. Bleached the shelf. Wrapped the carton in two layers of plastic and carried it to the dumpster herself.
"Denise?" she called, not turning around.
No answer. Denise was out front, taking an order from the college kid—the same one who'd been here Tuesday, Thursday, and now Saturday, never quite opening his textbook. The same one who, Ro had noticed in a detached kind of way, never actually seemed to be studying.
She picked up the carton. Opened it.
Twelve eggs. Perfect. Unbroken. Unexpired.
"Miriam?"
"Back here." The voice came from the office, muffled by the door that never quite closed right. "Something wrong?"
Ro looked at the eggs. Looked at where she'd scrubbed raw egg off the shelf three days ago. The shelf was clean. No smell of bleach anymore, just the cold, neutral scent of refrigeration.
"No," she said. "Just checking inventory."
"We're out of napkins. Order came in wrong."
"Got it."
She carried the eggs to the front cooler. Set them down next to the milk. Told herself—very firmly—that she'd misremembered. That she'd thrown out a different carton. That stress and sleep deprivation were doing what they always did, making the world soft at the edges.
But she remembered. She remembered the smell, the way the yolk had slipped down her wrist, the particular resistance of over-full trash bags.
Don't think about it.
The night wore on. Saturday brought a different crowd—the post-bar crowd, the pre-dawn crowd, the people who didn't fit anywhere else and so ended up at The Hollow Crown. Ro moved through her shift with mechanical efficiency. Coffee, eggs, more coffee. Wipe, refill, repeat.
The man with the tea didn't come.
She told herself she wasn't looking for him. That the relief she felt when each new customer wasn't him was just general relief, the same feeling she got when table seven failed to appear, when the companion with the wrong eyes stayed wherever companions with wrong eyes went on weekends.
At 2:30, the impossible thing happened.
Ro was carrying a plate of toast to table four—a middle-aged man in a suit that cost more than her monthly rent—when the lights flickered. Not unusual. The wiring in the diner predated most electrical codes, and Miriam had long ago accepted that the neon sign would buzz and the fluorescents would stutter.
But the flickering didn't stop.
It accelerated, a strobe effect that made everything jerky and wrong, like watching a film at the wrong frame rate. Ro stopped walking. The toast stayed on the plate, balanced on her hand, and she waited for it to pass.
The man at table four looked up. His face—she'd seen it before, she realized, this past Tuesday, this same suit, this same precisely arranged silverware—his face was different.
Not wrong, exactly. Not like the companion.
Older. Younger. Both at the same time, features shifting in the strobe light like someone was flipping through photographs of the same person at different ages.
The man smiled.
"The crack widens," he said.
Then the lights steadied, and the man was just a man again. Forty-ish. Balding. Bored. Looking at his toast like it had disappointed him.
"Excuse me," he said. "I asked for wheat."
Ro looked at the toast. White bread. Not wheat.
"Sorry," she said. "Kitchen mix-up."
"Yes." He smiled again, and it was a normal smile, tired and slightly annoyed. "They do that."
She took the plate. Walked back to the kitchen. Her hands were shaking, so she gripped the plate harder until her knuckles ached and the shaking stopped.
The kitchen was empty. Denise was out front—Ro could hear her laughing with someone, that easy, unaffected sound she made when she was comfortable.
Ro set the toast on the pass-through. Leaned against the wall.
The crack widens.
She hadn't misheard. She'd been standing three feet away, and the man had looked directly at her, and he'd said *the crack widens* like it meant something. Like she should understand.
But when she'd looked back, he'd been ordinary. Annoyed about bread. Nothing about him suggested he'd ever said anything stranger than a complaint about the service.
"Ro?"
She jumped. Miriam stood in the doorway to the office, seventy years old if she was a day, wearing the same purple cardigan she'd been wearing since Ro started working here. The cardigan had pills and stains and a general air of having witnessed things.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Miriam said.
"Just tired."
"That's not tired." Miriam stepped into the kitchen, moving with the deliberate slowness of someone who'd learned to ration their energy. "That's something else."
"I'm fine, Miriam."
"You found the eggs."
It wasn't a question. Ro felt her spine straighten, felt the defensive reflex kick in—the one that had kept her safe through childhood, through her father's drinking, through every situation where acknowledging a problem meant becoming responsible for solving it.
"What eggs?"
Miriam smiled. It wasn't a kind smile, exactly. Knowing. Patient. The smile of someone who'd been waiting for a conversation to start.
"The ones in the walk-in. The ones you threw out on Wednesday." She opened the cooler, took out the carton Ro had just put there. "These eggs."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes, you do." Miriam's voice didn't change. Still gentle. Still patient. "You've known for months. You just haven't let yourself know. There's a difference."
The kitchen seemed smaller suddenly. The walls closer. Ro could smell the grease in the vent hood, the old coffee grounds in the trash, something else underneath—something floral and faint and wrong.
"I don't want to know," she said.
"I know." Miriam set down the eggs. "That's why you lasted six months when most people barely make it through six weeks. You're good at not-knowing. Excellent at it."
"I just want to do my job. Save money. Finish my degree."
"And you can. You will." Miriam reached out, touched Ro's arm. Her fingers were warm, papery, familiar. "But not-knowing is like holding water in your hands, Ro. Eventually, it finds a way through. The crack widens."
Ro went still. "What did you say?"
"I said not-knowing—"
"No. The last part."
Miriam's expression shifted. Something flickered behind her eyes—concern, maybe. Or fear. "I didn't say anything about cracks."
"You did. You just said—" Ro stopped. The word felt heavy in her mouth now, wrong somehow. Like saying it aloud made it real. "The customer. Table four. He said it."
Miriam went to the pass-through. Looked out at the dining room.
"Table four is empty."
Ro pushed past her. Looked.
The table was empty. The toast was still there, growing cold on the pass-through. But the man—the man in the expensive suit, the man who'd been forty and sixty and twenty all at once—he was gone. His coffee cup sat empty on the table. His napkin, used and neatly folded, sat beside it.
And on the table, arranged with impossible precision:
Three coins. Not pound coins, not anything Ro recognized. Old. Heavy-looking. Stamped with something that might have been a tree.
"He left a tip," Ro said.
"He left a message." Miriam walked over to the table. She didn't touch the coins. "Means he expects to be back."
"Who is he?"
"Customer." Miriam's voice was carefully neutral. "Like the others. Like the tea drinker, the newspaper reader, the boy who never studies. They're all customers, Ro. You serve them. You don't ask."
"But you know."
Miriam looked at her. Really looked. The overhead light was harsh, showing every line, every spot of age on her skin, but her eyes—her eyes were sharp. Clear. The eyes of someone who'd made choices decades ago and lived with them every day since.
"I know what my grandmother knew," Miriam said. "What her mother knew. This place—" she gestured around the diner, at the worn booths, the buzzing sign, the window where something grey was pressing against the glass from outside "—this place is old. Older than the city, in some ways. It sits at a crossing. Always has. And the people who cross here, the ones who need somewhere to rest between where they were and where they're going... they pay for the privilege."
"With coins."
"With all sorts of things." Miriam picked up the used napkin, unfolded it. Written inside, in ink that hadn't been there before: *Tuesday.*
"He's coming back," Ro said.
"They always come back." Miriam folded the napkin again, tucked it in her apron. "Until they don't."
She walked back toward the office, moving slower now, like the conversation had cost her something.
"Miriam."
The old woman paused. Didn't turn around.
"The tea drinker. The one from Thursday. Do you know him?"
A long silence. Then: "I know what he is. Not who he is. Different thing."
"And what is he?"
Miriam looked over her shoulder. Her expression was unreadable.
"Dangerous," she said. "And patient. The combination is rarer than you'd think."
Then she was gone, the office door clicking shut behind her.
Ro stood in the empty diner. The fluorescent lights hummed their steady song. The coffee maker gurgled to itself. Outside, someone was walking past the window—a jogger, headphones in, completely unaware that anything might be wrong with the world.
She walked back to the kitchen. Picked up the eggs.
Threw them in the trash.
Went back out front. Poured coffee. Wiped tables. Did her job.
But she kept one eye on the door. And when the tea drinker finally came in at 4:15, when he sat at the counter and ordered his tea with two sugars and waited with that impossible stillness, she didn't let herself look at him.
She also didn't let herself look away.
He was reading something. A book, leather-bound, old enough to crack when he turned the pages. She caught a glimpse of the text as she passed—not English. Not any language she recognized. The characters seemed to move when she wasn't looking directly at them.
Don't think about it.
She made more coffee. Checked on the college kid, who was staring at his closed textbook like it had personally offended him. Straightened the salt and pepper shakers, which someone had arranged in reverse order.
The tea drinker turned a page.
Ro felt his eyes on her. Felt them the way you feel weather changing, a pressure shift against your skin.
"You're still here," he said.
She looked up. He was watching her, the book closed now on the counter. His expression wasn't unkind. Curious, maybe. Assessing.
"It's my shift."
"I meant—" he stopped. Started again. "Most people leave. The ones who notice. They find reasons to quit, transfer, develop allergies to night air. You haven't."
"I need the money."
"No one needs money that badly."
Ro shrugged. Wiped the counter with a cloth that didn't need wiping. "Then I guess I'm just stubborn."
"Stubbornness is a form of courage." He lifted his tea, drank. "Or a form of denial. Difficult to tell the difference, sometimes."
"Is that a warning?"
"An observation." He set down the cup. "You can serve them, you know. The ones who aren't... ordinary. You can serve them coffee and eggs and pretend not to see what they are. Many have. Many will."
"But?"
He smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was too sharp, too honest. "But pretending requires a certain kind of innocence. And you stopped being innocent approximately six months ago."
Ro felt her hands go cold. "What do you want?"
"Nothing yet." He stood, buttoned his coat in that precise three-button sequence she'd noticed before. "But when I do, you'll know."
He left a five-pound note on the counter. Exact payment for the tea, plus exact tip. Nothing extra, nothing less.
At the door, he paused.
"The man at table four. The one who left the coins. He wasn't wrong, you know. The crack is widening. And you're starting to see through it."
Then he was gone, and Ro was alone with the lingering smell of Earl Grey and the coins that shouldn't exist and the eggs that had come back from the trash.
She finished her shift. Counted her tips. Walked home in the grey morning light, thinking about cracks, about widening, about what it meant to see through something you'd spent your whole life learning not to see.
The thing about denial, she realized, was that it required cooperation. You had to agree to not-know. You had to choose it, over and over.
And she was getting tired of choosing.