Andrew caught the exact moment her smile disappeared two steps past the old man's table. Her face collapsed like a wall giving way. Just for a second. Then the mask came back.
Andrew pushed his plate to the side. He wasn't eating anymore. He pulled out his phone and opened the notes app. He typed four words: How long has this been happening? Then he looked toward Derek's office. The blue light flickered behind the glass. Music leaked through, something upbeat, careless. The man running his restaurant was watching videos while a woman held the building together with bleeding hands. Andrew closed his phone. He wasn't leaving tonight.
9:15. Andrew excused himself from the table and walked toward the restrooms. He didn't need the restroom. The hallway to the men's room passed within 8 feet of Derek's office. The door was open a crack, not enough to see in, but enough to hear everything. Andrew slowed his steps, pressed his shoulder against the wall, pretended to check his phone. Inside, Derek was talking. Not on the phone—to someone in the room.
"Sit down, Grace. Close the door."
A chair scraped. The door clicked shut, but not fully. The latch didn't catch. Andrew stayed.
"Time sheets for this week." Derek's voice was flat, administrative, like a man filling out paperwork. "I need you to sign."
A pause. Paper sliding across a desk. "Derek, this says 30 hours."
"I know what it says."
"I worked 46 hours this week. I have the screenshots. Every clock in, every clock out. And the time sheet says 30."
"Sign it."
The silence that followed was heavy. Andrew could hear the air conditioning humming through the vent above him. He could hear Grace breathing, slow, controlled—the kind of breathing someone uses when they're trying not to scream.
"This is the fourth time this month," Grace said.
"Third." Derek's chair creaked. He leaned back. "No, you're right. Fourth. And you signed every single one. So, what exactly are you complaining about?"
"I'm complaining because I can't pay my mother's hospital bills with hours that don't exist, Derek. Her insurance runs out in November. I need every hour on that sheet. Every one."
"Then I suggest you work harder. Pick up extra shifts. Or, here's an idea. Stop telling customers to leave, and maybe I'll feel generous."
Another pause. Andrew heard a pen click. "Sign it, Grace, or I find someone who will. You think you're the only waitress in this city? I could post your job online right now and have 30 applications by morning. 30 people who'd be grateful for those 30 hours. Who wouldn't complain. Who wouldn't go behind my back whispering to customers like some kind of saboteur."
"I wasn't sabotaging. I was being honest."
"Honest?" Derek laughed, one syllable, sharp. "Honest doesn't keep the lights on. Honest doesn't pay for your mother's oxygen tank. Signed timesheets do. So, sign the paper and go back to your tables before I dock you for this little conversation, too."
Andrew heard the pen scratch paper. One quick stroke. The sound of someone surrendering something they couldn't afford to lose.
"Good girl," Derek said. "See? That wasn't so hard."
The chair scraped again. Footsteps. The door opened fully, and Grace stepped into the hallway. She turned left toward the dining room. Andrew was standing 5 feet to the right, phone in hand, perfectly still. She didn't see him. Or if she did, she didn't acknowledge it. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead. Her jaw was set. The order pad was already back in her hand, but Andrew had seen her face in the half-second before she turned. It wasn't sadness. It wasn't defeat. It was the look of someone who'd been drowning so long they'd stopped reaching for the surface.
He let her go. Then he pulled up the calculator on his phone. 15 hours stolen per week. 4 weeks this month. At her hourly rate, which he knew because he'd set it himself 3 years ago, Derek Voss had stolen roughly $1,200 from Grace Taylor in 30 days. And if he'd been doing this to every employee—the servers, the busboy, the kitchen staff—the total over 18 months could be six figures. Easy.
Andrew put his phone away, walked back toward his table, but halfway across the dining room, he stopped. The menu. He picked up his copy from the table and studied it. Not the dishes, the prices. The signature ribeye was still listed at $58, the same price he'd set when the restaurant sourced its beef from a ranch in Montana: grass-fed, dry-aged in-house, hand-cut by a butcher Andrew had trained himself. But the steak he'd just eaten wasn't that steak. It wasn't even close. The meat was thin, commercially cut, the kind of product you buy frozen in bulk from a food service distributor for a third of the cost. The prices hadn't changed. But the ingredients had. Which meant the margin on every plate had tripled, and the difference was going somewhere.
Andrew looked at the receipt tucked under his bourbon glass. $62 for a meal that cost the restaurant maybe $12 to produce. He folded the receipt carefully, placed it in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, right next to his phone with its growing list of notes: wage theft, ingredient fraud, falsified timesheets, a health inspection certificate he hadn't seen on the wall (and he'd looked). The picture was forming piece by piece, and every piece pointed to the same man sitting in that blue-lit office watching videos while his staff bled for a paycheck he was stealing from them.