"I'm saying I don't know yet. And neither do you."
They sat for a while. The radiator under the window ticked. Out on the ice, the gull had lifted off and was beating slowly north, into the wind.
"Could you talk to them?" Moira said finally. She hated how it sounded. "To Abe, or to the district lady. If they heard it from you, that you didn't ask for it, that you came back to pay, maybe they'd change it. Not to give me the job back. Just to take the word off."
Ayanna looked at her for a long moment, and Moira saw, with a kind of embarrassment that burned all the way down, exactly what she had just done: she had looked at this woman, who worked overnights folding butter into dough and had been carried out of her own apartment by a burst pipe and had come back across town on a bus to pay twenty-five dollars she could not easily spare, and she had seen a rescue.
"I'm a baker with a seven-year-old and somebody else's apartment," Ayanna said. "I'm not your miracle, Moira. I'm not going to walk in there and make a speech and fix it. That's not who I am, and it's not what I'm for."
"I know. I'm sorry. Forget it."
"But I am going to go back," Ayanna said, and stood up, and picked up the envelope, and put it back in her pocket. "Because I still owe this. And because that man told me twice it wasn't just my table, and I want to know what table I'm sitting at."
She went on Wednesday, at a quarter to ten at night, after she had put Nyla to bed and asked Tavon's wife to sit in the flat for an hour with her phone and a cup of tea. She took the number one bus out Washington Avenue for the second time that month, and she sat in the bus shelter across from the Hearthstone and watched through the big front windows while Dacia stacked chairs on tables and a cook with a gray braid scraped down the flat-top. At ten the lights over the dining room went to half. At ten-oh-five she crossed the lot and knocked on the glass.
Abe came to the door himself. He did not look surprised. He looked like a man who had been half expecting a knock for a while and was almost relieved it had finally come. He unlocked the door and held it for her.
"Coffee's still on," he said. "It's terrible by now. You want some?"
"Please."