on her parka and walked Nyla to school and then took the number one bus out Washington Avenue to the Hearthstone Family Grill, with twenty-five dollars in an envelope in her pocket. She had thought about it carefully. The eighteen ninety-seven she still owed, which counted the forty-nine cents, and a tip that was fair on the whole meal, not just on the six dollars, because a tip on the six dollars would have been a way of pretending the rest had not happened.
It was eleven in the morning and the restaurant was half full with the brunch crowd, retirees and a table of nurses in scrubs. A young server with a nose ring and a high blond ponytail met her at the stand.
"Just one?"
"I'm actually looking for Moira. Is she working today?"
The server's face changed. She glanced over her shoulder toward the kitchen and then back, and she lowered her voice.
"Moira doesn't work here anymore," she said. "She got let go. Like, three weeks ago."
Ayanna stood very still. "Let go for what?"
The girl, whose name tag said DACIA, bit her lip. "I'm not supposed to really..." She looked toward the kitchen again. "Are you the lady with the little girl? In the snow?"
"Yes."
"Oh." Dacia closed her eyes for a second. "Okay. Hang on."
She went into the back. Ayanna stood at the host stand with her hand on the envelope in her pocket and felt something rise in her that she did not, at first, have a name for. It was not guilt, exactly, because she had not done anything. It was closer to the feeling she'd had in the Extended Stay lobby, watching the clerk run her card for a hold she had not agreed to and could not refuse: the feeling of having been entered into somebody else's ledger without being asked.
A big man in a white shirt and a Hearthstone tie came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. He had a heavy, tired face, and he stopped a few feet from her and looked at her the way Moira had once looked at her across table nine, as if checking the weight of a thing before he picked it up.
"I'm Abe Pellegrino," he said. "I'm the manager. Dacia says you were asking about Moira."
"Ayanna Cutler. I was in here on a Tuesday night in February. With my daughter. Moira gave us dinner."
"I know," Abe said. "I've seen the footage."
That landed oddly, and she let it. "Was she fired because of us?"