Something about the woman set off alarm bells in Serena’s head. This was a bad place for her. She wanted to go over and ask: Why are you here?

She didn’t, because that was the question she needed to ask Cat.

‘Why are you here, Cat?’

‘I wanted to go somewhere. I’m bored.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘Anna works here,’ Cat said. ‘She and I know the owner.’

Cat nodded at the waitress who’d been with her at the table. Anna was playing with her phone as she waited for the bartender at the taps. One of the sailors made a grab for the girl’s ass, and Anna intercepted his hand without so much as a glance at the man’s face.

‘She used to live on the streets, like me,’ Cat told Serena. ‘We’d hang out together. If she found a place to sleep, she let me crash there, too.’

‘I get it, but that’s not your world anymore.’

‘I’m entitled to have friends,’ Cat insisted, her lower lip bulging with defiance.

‘You are, but no one from your old life is a friend.’

Serena knew the struggle the girl faced. Not even three months ago, Cat Mateo had been a runaway. A teenage prostitute. When someone began stalking her in the city’s graffiti graveyard, she’d gone to Duluth police lieutenant Jonathan Stride for help. Serena and Stride had been lovers for four years, and she knew he had a weakness for a woman in trouble. They’d helped capture the man who’d been targeting Cat, and when the girl was safe, Stride made a decision that surprised Serena. He suggested that the teenager live with them, have her baby there, and grow up in a house with adults who cared about her.

Serena said yes, but she’d never believed that it would be easy for any of them. And it wasn’t.

‘You’re a sight for sore eyes in this place,’ a male voice announced.

A man in a rumpled blue dress shirt and loosely knotted tie stopped at their table. His eyes darted between Serena’s face and the full breasts swelling under her rain-damp T-shirt. He wiped his hands on a Budweiser bar towel.

‘This is Fred,’ Cat interjected. ‘He owns the bar.’

The man shot out a hand, which Serena shook. His fingers were sticky from sugar and limes. ‘Fred Sissel,’ he said cheerfully.

Sissel was around fifty years old, with slicked-back graying hair and a trimmed mustache. He wore the over-eager grin of a man who’d tried to smile his way out of everything bad in life. Fights. Debts. Drunk driving. His cuffs were frayed, and his shirt and tie were dotted with old food stains. His face had the mottled brown of too many visits to a tanning salon.