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“Tara. Oh, good, I was hoping I’d find you.” She’s carrying her tablet, and she looks harried for the first time since I’ve met her. “Kit says you’re the one who caught the spouts at station three. Thank you. That adds up to real money over a year.” She taps her screen. “Could I ask one more favor? It’ll take five minutes.”

“Sure.”

“The kitchen signed for a delivery of frozen fruit purée this afternoon. Passion fruit, raspberry, and lemon, for the cocktail program. The invoice says twelve cases. The system says eight. I can’t get back there for an hour, and I’d rather not find out Friday that we’ve been shorted.” She holds out a printed sheet. “Would you count the cases in the walk-in? They’ll be on the left-hand shelving, near the back.”

I glance at the back door. Billy Bob can wait five more minutes. “Where’s the walk-in?”

“Past the dish pit, the steel door on your right. You can’t miss it.” She smiles. “You’re a lifesaver.”

The walk-in freezer is exactly where she said it would be, a big stainless-steel door with a long chrome handle and a frosted window the size of a paperback. I pull it open, and cold air rolls out over my feet.

Inside, it’s about the size of my old kitchen, lit by two caged bulbs and lined with metal shelving. The compressor roars somewhere overhead. The thermometer by the door reads zero.

The door swings shut behind me on its own. They all do that, so the cold stays in. I don’t think anything of it.

I find the purée on the left, near the back, just like Corinne said. Passion fruit, raspberry, lemon, in white cardboard cases with the frost already forming on them. I count. Then I count again, because the cold is making it hard to think. There are twelve. The system was wrong.

I check them off on the sheet, tuck it in my back pocket, and push on the door.

It doesn’t open.

I push harder. Nothing. The door doesn’t even give. I look for the interior release, and it’s right where it should be, a big red plastic knob on a steel plunger at waist height. Every walk-in in the country has one. You push it, and it pops the latch from the inside, so nobody ever gets trapped.

I push it.

It sinks into the door with no resistance at all, like pressing a button that isn’t connected to anything, and the latch doesn’t move.

I hit it with the heel of my hand. I pull on it, in case I’ve got it backward. It slides in and out uselessly.

Okay. Somebody must have leaned on the outside handle, or the latch is iced up. I pound on the door with my fist.

“Hey! I’m in the freezer! Can somebody open the door?”

I pound again and yell until my throat hurts. Nobody answers. The dish machine twenty feet away is louder than the compressor, and on a Sunday night with a full house, nobody back there is listening for anything but tickets.

I pull out my phone. No bars. I walk the whole freezer holding it up near the ceiling, then against the frosted window. Nothing. I’m inside a steel box.

I’m in my uniform. My shoulders and arms are bare.

There’s no other door and no tools, nothing but food and ice. I find a metal scoop in a bucket and try to pry at the release housing, but it’s screwed shut, and my fingers are already too stiff to grip the scoop properly.

So I do the only thing I can. I keep moving.

I walk the length of the freezer and back. I jog in place with my hands tucked into my armpits. Every couple of minutes, I go back to the door and hit it with the scoop, as hard as I can, and yell. My voice comes back at me off the steel walls.

The cold gets into me in stages. First it’s just cold, the kind you can be annoyed about. Then it starts to hurt. My ears burn. My fingers go stiff, then clumsy, then white, and when I try to make a fist, they won’t close all the way. The shivering starts somewhere in my back and spreads until my teeth are knocking together so hard I bite my tongue.

I look at my phone. Ten forty-four.

The interior release on a walk-in isn’t supposed to fail. That’s the whole point of it. I don’t know what’s wrong with this one, and I’m too cold to think about it very hard.

I think about Billy Bob instead. He’s in the car, and it’s fifty-some degrees, and I told him ten-thirty. I think about the midnight renewal, and Lenart saying every night, and how stupid it would be to lose all of it on the first night because of a box of passion fruit purée. I think about how nobody knows I’m in here except Corinne, and Corinne won’t be back here for an hour.

Ten forty-eight. I can’t feel my feet.

I bang on the door with the scoop until it slips out of my fingers and I can’t make them pick it up again.

“Tara!”