“Milk would be fine,” Letty said. She’d barely placed a sandwich half on Maya’s plate before the little girl snatched it up and began gobbling it down. Letty had to force herself to chew slowly, savoring every bite.

“Mmm,” Maya said, chomping away at a carrot stick.

Ava beamed her approval as she added a second sandwich half to Maya’s plate. “That young’un was hungry. She fell on that food like a rat on a Cheeto.”

Letty choked back her laughter. “Sorry. We had a long drive down last night, and we did stop for dinner, but then she had an upset tummy, so I was afraid to let her eat too much after that. I’ve got to get us both back on a regular schedule, just as soon as we get settled into our room.”

“Where did y’all come from? I noticed the South Carolina tags on your car.”

“New Jersey,” Letty said, being deliberately vague. “But I bought the car secondhand, and I haven’t had time to get a new license plate.”

“I had an ex-sister-in-law from New Jersey, from around Newark,” Ava said, sipping from a glass of iced tea. “But she got run over by a garbage truck. I always thought that was poetic justice. Whereabouts are you from?”

“Hoboken,” Letty said. This was semi-true. She had lived in Hoboken, briefly, when she first moved to New York.

“How long have you been here at the Murmuring Surf?” she asked, eager to change the subject.

“Let’s see. Joe was just a baby. He was so little, and we were so poor, he slept in a dresser drawer until I could afford to buy a secondhand crib. He’s thirty-eight in July, so I guess it’s been that long.”

Letty stared out the window at the parking lot. A silver sedan pulled alongside her Kia and she felt herself tense. But then an older woman got out and began unloading a wheelchair from the trunk and she allowed herself to relax a little.

“Does Joe work here too? I mean, when he’s not being a police officer?” she asked.

“He’s actually a police detective, and he’d tell you he works here full-time, cop or no cop,” Ava said, rolling her eyes. “Both my kids work in the business. Joe does maintenance for me, and security, when we got problems, and Isabelle, she’s still in high school, when she’s not at school, she answers the phone and helps out some. I raised ’em like I was raised, to take responsibility early in life. What about you, Letty? What line of work are you in?”