“Goddammit, Niko!” she chokes out. He crows with laughter and strides off in his socks.

She hears the snap of a magnet—he’s added August to the fridge.

* * *

It doesn’t feel like a Friday that should change everything.

It’s the same as every Friday. Fight the shower for hot water (she’s finally getting the hang of it), cram cold leftovers into her mouth, make her way to campus. Return a book to the library. Sidestep a handsy stranger next to the falafel cart and trade tips for street meat. Hike back up the stairs because her name’s not Annie Depressant and she doesn’t have the nerve to ask about the service elevator inside Popeyes.

Change into her Pancake Billy’s T-shirt. Scrub at the circles under her eyes. Tuck her knife into her back pocket and make her way to work.

At least, she thinks, there will always be Billy’s. There’s Winfield, gently explaining the daily specials to a new hire who looks as scared shitless as August probably did on her first day. There’s Jerry, grumbling over the griddle, and Lucie, perched on a countertop, monitoring it all. Like the subway, Billy’s has been here for her every day, a constant at the center of her confusing New York universe—a dingy, grease-soaked little star.

Halfway into her shift, she sees it.

She’s ducking into the back hallway, checking her phone: a text from her mom, a dozen notifications in the household group chat, a reminder to refill her MetroCard. She stares at the wall, trying to remember if the MetroCard machine at her new station works, wishing she hadn’t had to change her whole commute—

And, oh.

There are hundreds of photos cluttering the walls of Billy’s, mismatched frames bumping together like bony shoulders. August has passed a lot of odd hours between rushes counting celebrities who’ve dined here, the vintage Dodgers photos wedged between Ray Liotta and Judith Light. But there’s this one photo, a foot to the left of the men’s room door, a sepia-toned four-by-six in a blue pearl frame. August must have looked past it a thousand times.

There’s a yellowed notecard stuck to it with four layers of tape, reinforced again and again over the years. In handwritten black ink: Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes Grand Opening—June 7, 1976.

It’s Billy’s at its most pristine, not a scorched bit of Formica in sight, shot from above like the photographer climbed proudly up onto a barstool. There are customers with blown-out hair and shorts so short, their thighs must’ve stuck to the vinyl. On the left side of the frame, Jerry—no more than twenty-five—pouring a cup of coffee. August has to admit: he was a babe.

But what makes her rip the photo off the wall, frame and all, and fake a bout of puking so she can clock out early with it shoved down the front of her shirt—is the person in the bottom right corner.

The girl is leaning up against the corner of a booth, apron suggesting she wandered out of the kitchen to talk to some customers, the short sleeves of her T-shirt rolled up above the subtle curve of her biceps. Her hair’s chin-length and spiky, swept back from her face. A little longer than August is used to.

Below the cuff of her sleeve, an anchor tattoo. Above that, the tail feathers of a bird. At her elbow, the neat line of Chinese characters.

1976. Jane. A single dimple at one side of her mouth.

Barely a day younger than she looks every morning on the train.

August runs the twelve blocks home without stopping.

* * *

August’s first word was “case.”

It wasn’t a cute word for the baby book like “mama” (she called her mother Suzette as a toddler) or “dada” (never had one, just a sperm donor a week after her mom’s thirty-seventh birthday). It wasn’t something that would magically make her judgmental grandparents and their old New Orleans money decide they cared to speak to her mom or know August, like maybe “tax evasion” or “Huey P. Long.” It wasn’t even something cool.

No, it was simply the word she heard most while her mother taped episodes of Dateline and read crime novels out loud to her squishy baby form and worked the one great missing persons case of their lives.

Case.

She took developmental psych her sophomore year, so she knows crucial developmental phases. Age three, learning how to read, so she could hand her mom the file that starts with M instead of N. Age five, able to carry on a conversation independently, like explaining tearfully to the man at the front desk of a French Quarter apartment building how she’d gotten lost, so her mom could scavenge his files while he was distracted. It’s hardwired.

It’s too easy, now, to dig it all back out.

She’s sitting on her bedroom floor, photo on one side, notebook on the other filled with five front-and-back pages of notes and questions and half-formed theories like hot zombie? and marty mcfly??? Her bedspread is burritoed around her like a foil shock blanket on a plane crash survivor. She’s gone full True Detective. It’s been four hours.

She’s unearthed her mother’s LexisNexis password, filed three public records requests online, put holds on five different books at the library. She’s shaking down double-digit pages of Google search results, trying to find some kind of answer that isn’t completely batshit fucking insane. “Immortal hottie” has no relevant returns, only people in goth bands who look like Kylo Ren.

She’s taken the photo out of the frame, looked at it under natural light, LED light, yellow light, held it inches from her face, walked down to the pawn shop next to Niko’s work and bought a fucking magnifying glass to examine it. No evidence that it’s been doctored. Only the faded shape of Jane, tattoos and dimple and cocky set of her hips, the continuing, impossible fact that she’s there. Forty-five years ago, she’s there.

She said it, that day she told August her name. She worked at Billy’s.

She never mentioned when.

August paces her room, trying to make sense of what she knows. Jane worked at Pancake Billy’s when it opened in 1976, long enough for an off-menu item to be named after her. She’s intimately familiar with the workings of the Q, and presumably lives in either Brooklyn or Manhattan.

The scraps of Craigslist posts and articles and police reports and one 2015 People of the City Instagram post with Jane blurry in the background are all August has to go on. She’s searched every possible permutation of Jane Su she can think of, alternate spellings and romanizations—Sou, Soo, So, Soh. No luck.

But there’s something else, a pattern she’s starting to piece together, one she probably would have figured out if she weren’t always so determined to reason things away.

How Jane never had a heavier coat than her leather jacket, even when it was punishingly cold back in January. How she didn’t know who Joy Division was, the mess of her cassette collection, that she has a cassette player in the first place. It shouldn’t have been easy to always catch her train. They should have missed each other, just once. But they never have, not since the first week.

She … God. What if …

August pulls her laptop into her lap. Her hands hover indecisively over the keys.

Jane doesn’t age. She’s magnetic and charming and gorgeous. She … kind of lives underground.

The cursor on the Google search bar blinks expectantly. August blinks back.