The photograph showed two sisters in school uniforms, grinning. One was Claire. The other was Mia’s mother, who had passed away the spring before. Mia had been placed with a foster family in another town, and after a bad argument one night she took a bus and vanished. Claire had been searching for six weeks, calling every shelter in Maine, and nobody had told her the girl was less than a mile from her own office.

Mia explained in a small voice that she had read the name Dunmore on a staff notice board in the mall corridor. She recognized it from her mother’s old letters, but she was too afraid to knock. She had worked up her courage every night and failed. The blanket, the bed, and my cocoa had been enough to keep her going, and she had drawn me a picture because it was all she had to give.

Claire turned to me with wet eyes. She said the rule I had broken was a good rule, and then she said she would have broken it too. She told the two men from head office to write nothing down. Then she asked me whether a kind man with a thermos would consider being named in the paperwork as the first person to look after her niece.

Mia moved into Claire’s home that same week. The mall gave her a Saturday job, and her mural, painted on the wall beside the fountain, shows a tired guard and a cocoa thermos beneath a thousand small lights. I still make rounds at midnight, two, and four. At two, I always stop at the fountain, and Mia, now seventeen, sometimes waves from the window of the furniture store.