Lathrop Avenue when she was nine and he brought home a man from the bus station and fed him pierogi and let him sleep on the couch. He had said it when her mother left, when Moira was eleven, and her mother had said, on her way out, with her suitcase in her hand, that it was very easy to be a saint with somebody else's grocery money. Moira had not understood what her mother meant. She had decided, at eleven, standing at the top of the stairs, that her mother was a hard woman and her father was a good man, and she had built herself on that decision the way you build a house on whatever ground is there.
She sat on the floor of her bedroom with the shoebox in her lap and the letter that said theft beside it and thought: I am the kind of person who feeds people. I have always been that person. And they have written down, in a file anybody can call and ask about, that I am a thief.
She did not sleep much.
Ayanna Cutler's alarm went off at two-fifteen in the morning, as it did every morning but Sunday and Monday, and she was up before it finished its first ring, because her body had learned the hour years ago and only used the alarm as a formality, like a doorbell on a house where the door was always open.
By the last week of February she and Nyla were out of the Extended Stay and into a two-bedroom upstairs flat on Erie Street that belonged to her cousin Tavon's mother-in-law, who was in Arizona until April and wanted somebody in the place to keep the pipes from freezing. It was not theirs and it smelled of somebody else's potpourri, and Ayanna kept everything they owned in the duffel bags and the two plastic tubs they had carried out of Racine Street, so that she would never have to pack in a hurry again. But it was warm, and it had a door that locked, and it was four blocks from Nyla's school, and it was eleven minutes by bus to Bakken's.
Bakken's Danish Bakery had been making kringle on the south side of Racine since 1949, and Ayanna had been laminating dough there for three years. She worked the overnight production shift, three to eleven, and she was very good at it, which was a thing she allowed herself to know. She could take a slab of butter and a sheet of dough and fold them into thirty-two layers by hand, each one so even that when the kringle came out of the oven you could see every layer in the