It was, she thought, the first real restaurant meal she’d eaten alone since that awful Sunday afternoon back in New York. She picked up the tiny fork provided by the café and nibbled at the sweet crabmeat, savoring the opportunity to taste her food, rather than wolf it down in order to help feed her niece.

Meals with Maya were simple affairs: cereal, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, grapes or strawberries or orange slices, spaghetti, chicken fingers, steamed carrots or broccoli, hot dogs or hamburgers, and her default dinner choice, grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato or chicken noodle soup.

It wasn’t as if she’d never spent time with her niece, or fed her or taken her places, while Tanya was alive, but living with and raising a four-year-old required a vast adjustment, both in her standards and her attitudes.

As she sipped her iced tea she once again pondered the issue of Maya’s future—and hers. According to Tanya’s lawyer, her sister’s estate had the potential to provide security for Maya—but only if Evan didn’t sue to retain control of the property he’d placed in Tanya’s name.

She was positive that Evan would also fight to keep Letty from becoming Maya’s legal guardian—unless, maybe? She could prove that Evan wasn’t Maya’s biological father. And that Evan had murdered Tanya. To do that, she’d need to stay out of jail.

Letty had already vowed that she wouldn’t return to New York until she could prove her own innocence—and be sure that Maya wouldn’t be placed either with Evan or in foster care.

Foster care was the dark, terrifying bogeyman in any consideration of what would become of Maya. Letty and Tanya had agreed, long ago, never to speak again about their own experience in foster care.

A month—thirty days—was all they’d spent living in a foster home in West Virginia. It happened the summer they were thirteen and fourteen. Terri’s latest boyfriend, a mean drunk who was also a local sheriff’s deputy, had confiscated Tanya’s Game Boy, after she’d flunked summer school. Tanya had persuaded Letty to run away with her. After stealing the Greyhound bus fare from Terri’s purse, they’d gotten as far as Paducah, Kentucky, before the bus driver, sensing trouble, called the authorities, who in turn called Terri.

When they returned home, Terri’s boyfriend told the local child welfare authorities that the two girls were ungovernable, wildly out of control, and petty thieves.