The package sits on my desk like a live grenade—manila envelope, no return address, but I know Miguel's handwriting. The way he loops his letters, careful and precise, the same way he used to write notes for Lena's school when they were kids. Now he's using that same careful hand to destroy us.
Inside: copies of everything. Every tracking report. Every surveillance photo. Every transcript of conversations she thought were private. My sins laid out in black and white, delivered to her an hour ago according to Tommy's panicked call.
The air in my office tastes like leather and pending disaster, that particular flavor of adrenaline when you know the bomb's about to go off but can't stop the timer.
The door explodes open before I can prepare, and there she is—my entire world, holding the matching envelope. Her fingers know something's wrong before her brain catches up—I watch her hands tremble, watch the paper shake like autumn leaves about to fall. The fluorescent light overhead buzzes, a sound I've never noticed before, but now it fills the space between us like static.
"Tell me it's fake." Her voice comes out raw, desperate, each word scraping against her throat. "Tell me Miguel fabricated this to break us."
The silence between us breathes—inhale, exhale—expanding with each second I don't deny it. My thumb finds my wrist pulse, that self-soothing gesture from childhood, from every moment before violence. She notices. Of course she notices. Her medical training means she reads bodies like others read books.
"How long?" The question drops between us, soft as a scalpel. "How long have you been watching me?"
I could lie. Could minimize. But she deserves truth, even if it tastes like broken glass in my mouth.
"Three months."
Her body processes this information in waves—first her shoulders, drawing up like armor, then her chest, breath catching, finally her hands, clenching the envelope until her knuckles go white. Three months reorganize themselves in her mind like a film reel playing backward, every spontaneous moment revealing its choreography.
"Three—" She stops, and I watch her do the math, watch understanding bloom across her face like blood in water. "After my birthday. After I said I loved you. That's when you started?"
The fluorescent buzz gets louder. Or maybe that's my blood, roaring in my ears.
"Dios mío." The Spanish slips out, the way it does when she's beyond regular emotion, when English can't contain what she's feeling. Her hand presses against her sternum, like she's trying to hold something in or push something out. "You heard me say I loved you and decided that meant you owned me?"
"That's not—"
"¿Qué no es?" She's switching between languages now, her voice fracturing along linguistic lines. "Every patient I thought chose to trust me—did they? Or did you send them? When you showed up at the garage that night after Carlos threatened me, when you found me at the clinic after midnight—was any of it real?"
"It was all real—"
"How would I know?" The scream tears from her throat, primal and wounded. She grabs a handful of transcripts, waving them like evidence. "Mrs. Rodriguez talking about her husband breaking her ribs. Marcus describing his overdose in detail I didn't include in my notes. Maria sobbing about choosing between insulin and rent. These were sacred, Zane! These people bled their secrets into my hands!"
Each name hits like a bullet. I know those stories. Read them. Filed them away as potential threats, potential leverage, potential nothing—just information to hoard like a dragon with gold.
"I never used that information—"
"You CONSUMED it!" She picks up one specific transcript, and I see her hands shake with something beyond rage—revulsion, maybe. Like she's holding something diseased. "This teenage girl. Sixteen. Came in after... after what happened to her. She couldn't stop showering. Said she could still feel his hands." Her voice drops to a whisper that somehow fills the room. "You read every word. You know her name. Where she lives. What he did. You sat in this leather chair and consumed her trauma like it was yours to own."
My throat closes. The office suddenly smells like shame—metallic and suffocating.
"I can explain—"
"Can you?" She throws the envelope on my desk, photos scattering like accusations. There's one of her crying in her van after losing that kid—she'd pulled over three blocks away, thought she was alone. Another from 3 AM, her face illuminated by phone screen as she typed and deleted, typed and deleted messages to me. "Can you explain why you've been inside my phone for three months? Reading every thought I typed and deleted? Watching me through my own camera?"
"I needed to keep you safe."
"From what?" She's pacing now, and I notice she keeps her left hand on her belly—protective, instinctive. "From having thoughts you don't monitor? From existing in spaces you don't own?"
"From them. From your brother, from rivals—"
"From having any choice in this?" She laughs, but it sounds like something breaking—delicate and irreparable. "The GPS logs." Another paper, thrown with precision. "Every single place I've been for three months. Including—" She stops, fresh understanding dawning. "Including my visits to Father Martinez. My confession. You knew I was struggling with guilt about us, about betraying Miguel. You knew and you let me wrestle with God while you played deity yourself."
The space between us fills with everything I can't say: that knowing everything about her felt like intimacy, that her secrets became my heartbeat, that surveillance became synonymous with love in my twisted arithmetic.
"When you started watching me," she says slowly, like she's diagnosing something terminal, "that's when you stopped trusting me. The surveillance didn't start when you met me—it started when you loved me. What does that say about your love, Zane?"
The truth of it sits in my chest like swallowed glass. She's right. The deeper I fell, the more I needed to possess, to catalog, to confirm she was mine in ways that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with ownership.
