There was a woman sitting in the office chair. Abe stood. There was nowhere for Moira to sit, so she stood too, with her back against the door.
"Moira, this is Rena Haig. She's the district manager for Lakeshore."
"Hi, Moira." Rena Haig was in her forties, with short gray hair and a quarter-zip fleece with the Lakeshore Hospitality Partners logo stitched on the chest and reading glasses pushed up on her head. She had a laptop open on the desk and a manila folder beside it and a travel mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST AUNT. She did not look like a villain. She looked like somebody who had been driving between fourteen restaurants in the snow since six in the morning and had three more stops after this one. "Thanks for coming back. I'll try to be quick, because I know you've got a section."
"Okay."
"Every quarter our loss prevention team runs a variance review on every location. Food cost, comps, voids, waste. When something sits outside the band, they pull the transactions and match them against the footage." Rena turned the laptop a few degrees so Moira could see it. On the screen was a still image from the camera above the pass, gray and grainy, with a timestamp in the corner. It showed Moira from above, carrying a tray. The tray had a pot pie on it. "This is Tuesday night, seven fifty-two. The pot pie and the chili on this tray were logged to waste as a temperature remake at seven forty-four, under your server number. The footage shows they went to table nine." She clicked. Another still. Moira setting the pot pie in front of Ayanna, the top of Ayanna's hood visible, Nyla a small blur. "Is that accurate?"
Moira looked at Abe. Abe was looking at the safe.
"Yes," she said. "That's accurate. They were hungry. The little girl was hungry. It was a pot pie."
"I understand," Rena said, and the strange thing was that she sounded like she did. "I'm not here to tell you that wasn't a kind thing to do. I'm sure it was. But I need you to understand how this looks from where I sit. That's eighteen dollars and forty-eight cents of product logged as waste that wasn't waste. That's a falsified record. And I'm going to be honest with you, it isn't the first one." She opened the manila folder. Inside was a printout, several pages, with lines highlighted in yellow. "This is your server number on the waste screen going back to September. I'm not going to go through it line by line. Some of these are probably real. A lot of them aren't."