With a raised eyebrow, Ronda Rousey looked at the name that was flashing on the screen of her phone as it vibrated, seemingly insistent about the call being answered. The reason Ronda hesitated was to give herself a moment to try and figure out why the manager of the restaurant she and her husband Seth owned might be calling her late in the afternoon, when she was just walking out of the gym.

Even on the rare occasion that there was a problem that the owners had to attend to, Seth was the first one who was supposed to be contacted. It wasn't late enough in the day for him to be unavailable at that evening's house show, so why was she the one getting the call?

Only one answer made sense: she was going to be asked to go to the restaurant for some reason. Jack, the manager, knew that she was spending the week working from home for The Rousey Foundation, the charity that she and Seth had founded to help injured firefighters.

"Hello?" she answered, just in time to avoid missing the call, making her confusion more than apparent with her tone.

"Ronda? Jack. How are you?"

"Not bad," Ronda said crisply, approaching her Ferrari in the gym's parking lot. The chance to drive it was all the more enjoyable because of how rare those opportunities were. "What can I do for you?" she asked, wanting to get to the point.

"Can you please come down to the restaurant? We've got an emergency here."

Ronda had climbed into the sports car as she'd listened. Firing up the engine, she enjoyed the powerful-sounding purr it produced. "What emergency?" she asked, seeing her pained expression in the rear-view mirror.

"We've had a sickness bug wipe out a lot of the staff," Jack told her. "We're down one chef, which I've covered by calling someone else in, but we're also without a whole bunch of the wait staff. We got through lunch service, but I had to send two more home."

"So call in whoever's day off it is and ask them to come in and cover," Ronda said, still wondering why she was being bothered with this.

"I wish I could," Jack assured her. "This sickness thing started yesterday. The ones who weren't in already today are the ones who came down with it yesterday. I've made some calls and managed to get one temp to come in, even on short notice like this. Even so, there's no way we can get through dinner service tonight without at the very least one more pair of hands. We're fully booked tonight, as always. This short of people, we'd be sure to give poor service, and I'm not prepared to give poor service to customers."

Ronda closed her eyes and counted to three in her head. It was a handy trick her therapist had taught her, which helped her avoid saying something she would have quickly regretted, particularly as Jack didn't deserve it. Feeling slightly calmer, she admitted that he seemed to be doing the best he could in a very unfortunate and difficult situation. It wasn't as if making the call to her would have been easy for him. And besides, she and Seth had decided to open the restaurant. It was unrealistic to expect to own a successful business and never have to put work into it, whether they'd hired someone to manage the place for them or not.

"Alright," she sighed. "I'll be there in ten minutes."

"Thanks, Ronda. It's either that or we have to close and let down everyone who made a reservation tonight. That's the last thing I want to do."

"No, we can't do that," Ronda said. Eating out at expensive restaurants was one of the things she liked doing the most when she was with Seth, and she knew how annoyed she would be if she reserved a table and then found the place closed when she got there. "I'll be there soon."

Ending the call, she tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and pulled out of the lot. Having a fast car was good for letting frustration out, too.

Jack opened the door himself when she arrived at The Venice Steakhouse in less than the ten minutes she had promised. He was an a dark-haired, attractive man in his early forties. As always, he wore a perfectly tailored suit. After greetings were exchanged, Jack said, "Thanks for coming. I was totally out of options."

"I'm sorry for sounding reluctant," Ronda said, feeling better about the situation after having some time to think it over in the car. "It sounds like you've done everything you could to keep us open tonight. I appreciate it."

Smiling pleasantly, Jack waved a hand in the direction of some of the wait staff, who were in the process of setting tables. They were trying not to pay too much attention to the Hollywood actress and former wrestler who also happened to be their boss. "Thank these guys," Jack said. "They're the ones who are going to be rushed off their feet tonight. Even with you coming in, we're still down on numbers."

"I'll make sure they know I appreciate their hard work," Ronda promised. "So, you need me to run the place tonight then, right?"

"Uh, no," Jack faltered, obviously thrown off by the question. "No offense, but you don't know how to run a restaurant anything like as well as I do. That's one of the reasons you hired me. I don't need a manager, Ronda, I need a waitress."

Ronda's mouth dropped open for a second. "You need a... You want me to be a waitress?"

"That's right," Jack said, keeping his cool. "Like I said, without you helping out, I don't have enough people to even open tonight. I know it's hardly something you'd want to do, but it is your business when it's all said and done." That was as far as he was going to push his luck.

"You're right," Ronda mumbled. By now, she was sure this was all a prank of some kind and Seth was going to appear from somewhere, laughing his head off at her. But no, this was for real. She really was being asked to work a shift as a waitress. And she had to do it, too.

Many years earlier, before a career in wrestling had even been an idea for her, she had worked as a bartender in a bar that had stood on the exact same site that was now occupied by The Venice Steakhouse. This was about as close to full circle as it was going to get, she realised.

"Okay, Jack, you've got yourself a waitress for the night. What do I need to do?"

Jack gestured to a nearby table and they sat down opposite each other. "I'm sure you eat in restaurants like ours often enough. You know the kind of service you expect as a customer from wait staff. You need to make sure you deliver that level of service. There are some other things we should go over, also. It's going to be frantic when we open, so we all need to be on the same page."

"I hear you," Ronda said. "Tell me what you need me to do and I'll do it. Tonight, you're the boss."

"I'm glad you said that," Jack said with a hint of a smile. "You're exactly right; tonight, I'm the boss."

"At least it fits me," Ronda muttered unhappily to herself, looking at her reflection in a full length mirror in the staff changing room. The uniform at The Venice Steakhouse was the same for both men and women: black pants, dark blue shirt and black waistcoat. Luckily, if that was the right word, one of the spare uniforms was the perfect size for her. She had to admit that it was certainly more professional than wearing the jeans and T-shirt she'd worn for her trip to the gym.

"Alright, let's get it over with," she told the reflection. Knowing that customers would already be coming into the restaurant, she hurried back down the stairs. Sure enough, the tables were already filling up with diners who had made reservations for the earliest available time. All of the wait staff on this particular night happened to be women, Ronda noticed for the first time as she watched them already busying themselves with their customers.

"Ronda, there you are," Jack said, walking briskly over to her. He gestured to a row of tables against the wall along the left hand side of the dining area. "Those are your tables," he told her, handing her one of the tablets that worked with the restaurant's automated ordering system. There had been enough time before opening for one of the other girls to teach her how it worked.

"Perfect," Ronda grumbled, trudging towards the first table. Three men in their twenties were sitting there. They were exactly the kind of demographic that watched the movies she had been in. They had almost certainly some of them, and they maybe even watched wrestling, too. She felt certain she was going to be recognised at the very first table she had to serve. Trying to focus, she ran through the kind of service she expected to get when she and Seth were the paying customers at a restaurant. That was what she needed to try and deliver.

"Hi, guys," she said cheerfully when she reached the table, with one of her best smiles.

"Oh shit!" one of the guys exclaimed. "Ronda? No way!"

"Hi," she said, the smile remaining in place as she sighed inwardly.

"I knew you owned the place," one of the others said, eyes widened in surprise. "I didn't know you worked here, too."

"I don't, usually," Ronda informed him politely. "I'm stepping in to cover a staff shortage. Can I start you off with some drinks?"

The three men ordered beers all round, then the one who hadn't spoken so far decided to push his luck. "Yo, can we get a selfie with you before you go?"

Ronda was used to that kind of request, but not in this sort of situation. "Sure," she agreed, not wanting to seem rude to a customer by turning him down. She was wary that Jack might be watching her. It had been a lot of years since she'd had that feeling of being scrutinized by a boss like that, and it was even more weird because she actually owned the place.

The guy who had asked for the selfie took his phone out, then moved over for Ronda to sit down next to him. It was the only way all four people could get in the shot. "Can you take it?" he asked, passing his iPhone to her, camera already loaded.

Ronda held the phone out at arm's length and smiled broadly while the three guys did likewise. She took the picture then handed the phone back.

"Thanks, Ronda," the phone's owner grinned, obviously happy that he had a anecdote that would keep him going for a while.

"You're welcome," Ronda said. "I'll go get your drinks now."

Setting off towards the bar, she heard one of them say, "Being waiting on by Ronda fucking Rousey. Can you believe it?" He hadn't quite managed to keep his voice down enough, and the laughter that followed definitely wasn't quiet at all.

Jack cut her off before she made it to the bar, a reproachful expression on his face. "We don't have five minutes for every drinks order, Ronda. The selfies are a no go, okay?"

"Yeah," Ronda said, already feeling her patience starting to wear thin.

By her reckoning, she had been recognised by people at half of the tables she was working by the time she finished taking drinks orders. She could also tell that she was working at a slower pace with her tables than the other girls were with theirs. Being a waitress was hard, undervalued work. To say it was going to be a long night was an understatement.