“You win,” Addie conceded. “Let me just go tell Delilah where I’m off to.”

Before she could reach the kitchen, however, Jack emerged, holding her parka. Seeing the others, he blanched and ducked his head. “Delilah said I should bring this in,” he mumbled. “She said a night off won’t kill you.”

“Oh . . . thanks. Well, I’m glad you came out. I want you to meet Darla.”

Darla held out her hand, which Jack did not take. “Charmed,” she said.

“And this is Wes,” Addie said shortly, shrugging into her coat. “All right. Let’s get this over with. Darla, you’ll tell Delilah to have Chloe in bed by eight?”

No one seemed to be listening. Darla was turning up the TV volume from behind the counter, and Wes squinted at Jack, who trying to sink between the cracks of the linoleum. “Have we met?” Wes asked.

Jack ducked his head, refusing to meet the man’s eye. “No,” he said, clearing a table. “I don’t think so.”

It wasn’t that Wes Courtemanche was such an awful guy-he just wasn’t the right one for Addie, and nothing she said or did seemed to convince him otherwise. After about twenty minutes, a date with Wes took on the feeling of slamming oneself repeatedly into a brick wall. They walked side by side through town, holding Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate. Addie glanced across the green, where the lighted windows of the diner resembled holiday candelabra. “Wes,” she said for the sixth time, “I really have to go-now.”

“Three questions. Just three tiny questions so I can get to know you better.”

She sighed. “All right. And then I’m going.”

“Give me a minute. I’ve got to make sure they’re good ones.” They had just turned the corner of the green when Wes spoke again. “Why do you stay on at the diner?”

The question surprised Addie; she’d been expecting something far more facetious. She stopped walking, steam from her cup wreathing her face like a mystery. “I guess,” she said slowly, “because I have nowhere else to go.”

“How would you know, since you’ve been doing it all your life?”

Addie cast him a sidelong glance. “Is this number two?”

“No. It’s number one, part b.”

“It’s hard to explain, unless you’ve been in the business. You get attached to creating a place where people can come in and feel like they fit. Look at Stuart and Wallace . . . or the student who reads Nietzsche in the back booth every morning. Or even you, and the other police officers who stop in for coffee. If I left, where would they all go?” She shrugged. “In some ways, that diner’s the only home my daughter’s ever known.”

“But Addie-”

She cleared her throat before he could finish speaking. “Number two?”

“If you could be anything in the world, what would you be?”

“A mother,” she said after a moment. “I’d be a mother.”

Wes slid his free arm around her waist and grinned, his teeth as white as the claw of moon above them. “You must be reading my mind, honey, since that brings me right to my third question.” He pressed his lips over her ear, his words vibrating against her skin. “How do you like your eggs in the morning?”

He’s too close. Addie’s breath knotted at the back of her throat and every inch of her skin broke out in a cold sweat. “Unfertilized!” she answered, managing to jam her elbow into his side. Then she ran for the buttery windows of the diner like a sailor from a capsized ship who spies a lighthouse, lashes his hope to it, and swims toward salvation.

Jack and Delilah stood side by side chopping onions, taking advantage of a slow after-dinner crowd to get a head start on tomorrow’s soup. The scent of onions pricked the back of his nose and drew false tears, but anything was preferable to finding himself backed into corners by Darla. Delilah raised the tip of her knife and pointed to a spot a foot away from Jack. “She died right there,” Delilah said. “Came in, gave Roy hell, and collapsed on the floor.”

“But it wasn’t her fault Roy had put the wrong side order on the plate.”

Delilah looked at him sidelong. “Doesn’t matter. Roy was busy as all get-out and didn’t want to take any fuss from Margaret, so he just said, ‘You want your peas? Here’re your goddamn peas.’ And he threw the pot of them at her.”

Delilah scraped her onions into a bucket. “He didn’t hit her or anything. It was just a temper he was in. But I guess it was too much for Margaret.” She handed Jack another onion to chop. “Doctor said her heart was like a bomb ticking in her chest and that it would have given out even if she hadn’t been fighting with Roy. I say a heart stopped that day, sure, but I’m thinking it was his. Everyone knows he blames himself for what happened.”

Jack thought of what it would be like to go through life knowing that the last conversation you had with your wife involved throwing a cast-iron pot at her. “All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down,” he agreed.

“Mighty profound from a dishwasher.” Delilah tilted her head. “Where’d you come from, anyway?”

Jack’s hand slipped and the knife sliced across the tip of his finger. Blood welled at the seam, and he lifted his hand before he could contaminate the food.

Delilah fussed over him, handing him a clean rag to stop the bleeding and insisting he hold the wound under running water. “It’s nothing,” Jack said. He brought his fingertip to his mouth, sucking. “Must’ve been hard on Addie.”

“Huh? Oh, you mean her mom dying. Actually, it gave her something to throw herself into, after Chloe.” Delilah looked up. “You do know about Chloe?”

Jack had heard Addie speaking to Chloe in the tender, idiomatic language of a mother. “Her daughter, right? I haven’t met her yet, but I figured she was around here somewhere.”

“Chloe was Addie’s little girl. She died when she was ten. Just about ruined Addie-she spent two years holed up in her house, nothing but her own upset for company. Until her mom passed and it was up to her to take care of Roy and the diner.”

Jack pressed the cloth against his cut so hard he could feel his pulse. He thought about the plate he’d stolen fries from today, heaped with food no one had touched. He thought of all the times he’d heard Addie talking to a girl who didn’t exist. “But-”

Delilah held up a hand. “I know. Most people around here think Addie’s gone off the deep end.”

“You don’t?”

The cook chewed on her lower lip for a moment, staring at Jack’s bandaged hand. “I think,” she said finally, “that all of us have got our ghosts.”

Before shutting off the grill and leaving with Darla, Delilah had made Jack a burger. He was sitting on the stool next to Chloe’s now, watching Addie close up. She moved from table to table like a bumblebee, refilling the sugar containers and the ketchup bottles, keeping time to the tune of a commercial on the overhead TV.

She’d come back from her dinner engagement silent and disturbed-so much so that at first Jack was certain she knew about him. But as he watched her attack her job with a near frenzy, he realized that she was only being penitent, as if she had to work twice as hard to make up for taking a few hours off.

Jack lifted the burger to his mouth and took a bite. Addie was now hard at work on the salt shakers, mixing the contents with rice so that the salt grains wouldn’t stick. On the television, the Jeopardy! theme music swelled through the speakers. Without intending to, Jack found himself sitting higher in his seat. Alex Trebek walked onto the stage in his natty suit and greeted the three contestants, then pointed to the board, where the computerized jingle heralded the first round’s categories.

A method of working this metal was not mastered until 1500 B.C.

“What is iron?” Jack said.

A contestant on the television rang in. “What is iron?” the woman repeated.

“That’s correct!” Alex Trebek answered.

Addie looked up at Jack, then at the TV, and smiled. “Jeopardy! fan?”