The edges of the girl’s mouth loosened, but she’d yet to look Violet full in the face.

“What’s your name?”

“Maya.”

“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Violet.”

Maya wore denim shorts and a green T-shirt with the Sugar Shack logo across the front, and she’d pulled her thick dark hair up into a bun at the back of her head. Long tendrils had escaped around her face, and Violet noticed the sparkle of a tiny nose ring as Maya glanced down to check her watch again.

“I’ve got to get back to work. I just had a short break between shifts.” She hesitated, her gaze bouncing up to Violet’s face and away again.

Violet thought she was going to say something else, but instead she gave one last wave back at Trudy, then slipped through the door and down the street in the direction of the diner.

Later, as they locked up for the day, Trudy handed Violet a piece of paper. She said she’s not an artist, but she has good hands. She knows how to use the materials.

Violet gave a slow nod but didn’t speak.

You don’t like her?

“I didn’t say that.”

Trudy crossed her arms and eyed Violet, waiting for her explanation, but Violet grabbed her purse and walked to the door. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

At a stoplight on Chestnut Street, Trudy nudged Violet’s shoulder and pointed across the street. Maya was climbing out of the driver’s seat of a beat-up black car. She slung a bag over her shoulder and walked up the steps to the apartment above Fritz’s Bait Shop.

Fritz Meyer rented out the room, often to drifters who came through town looking for work on one of the fishing boats that set out each day from the docks upriver. Fritz was a nice man, but the studio apartment couldn’t be a very nice place to live. Did she live there alone? The bait shop was small, but the room above it seemed hardly big enough to house even one person.

Trudy’s concern filled the nooks and crannies of the car. “I know,” Violet muttered to her sister. “I feel it too.” She rolled her window down a crack to have some breathing space.

The light changed to green, and just as Violet let off the brake, Maya unlocked the door and walked inside.

* * *

The bedsprings of the thin mattress dug into Maya’s back between her shoulder blades, but the room wasn’t all that bad. In fact, it was far better than many of the places she had slept: a cot in a concrete-floored garage, a middle bunk in a claustrophobic group home, a sweltering attic space she’d shared with two pigeons and a mouse. Some places had been okay—the cottage in the woods with the couple who raised goats, the big house in the suburbs with three other kids and two rowdy dogs, the couple in their fifties who made up for their disappointment at not being able to produce their own children with false cheer and promises for a bright future.