"¿Cuál es tu nombre verdadero?"
What is your real name?
His eyes widened. Then softened. The question had told him something—that I'd been paying attention, that I understood the names on the High Basin roster were as false as everything else the company had given them.
"Ernesto," he answered quietly. "Ernesto Vega."
Not Miguel. Ernesto. I said the name back to him and watched something settle in his face—the same settling I'd seen in Mateo's when Diego had spoken his real name in the bunkhouse.
I turned to the woman with the braid. "¿Y tú?"
She looked at me for a long moment. Her dark eyes cautious, measuring. Then: "Ana. Me llamo Ana."
My name is Ana.
Not Sofía. Ana. The name she'd been born with, spoken for the first time in however many months she'd been living inside someone else's identity.
"Mucho gusto, Ana. Ernesto." I said it simply.Pleased to meet you.As if we were being introduced for the first time, because in a way, we were.
Irish had noticed the workers watching his kitchen chaos and had leaned into it—the showmanship cranked up, the gestures bigger, the grin wider. He winked at Ana as he flipped something in a pan with unnecessary flair, and she covered her mouth with her hand—not fear this time, but the beginning of a laugh. He pointed his spoon at Mateo and said "you, young man, look like you know your way around a kitchen," and Mateo's face did something between confusion and the first real smile I'd seen from him.
Irish's charm worked like a weapon of a different kind. Warmth deployed with the same instinct other men deployed fists. Within thirty minutes, he had two of the workers helping him plate food, their white long-sleeved shirts pushed up to the elbows for the first time I'd ever seen—not because they'd forgotten the brands, but because the kitchen was hot and the man in the apron had made the room feel safe enough to stop hiding.
Diego arrived as dinner was being served. He moved through the doorway the way he always moved—quiet, economical, the dark eyes scanning the room before his body committed to entering it. He'd changed into a clean black T-shirt and dark jeans, his hair still slightly damp. He looked rested. Not relaxed—I wasn't sure Diego knew how to be relaxed—but the sharp edge of the exhaustion had been blunted.
He sat across from me at the table. Not beside me this time. Across. The configuration from the bar, from the kitchen at midnight. Two men and a table and the distance between them.
He spoke to the workers in Spanish. Quiet, unhurried conversations—how are you feeling, did you eat enough, is the room okay. Ernesto answered at length, his weathered hands moving as he spoke, and Diego listened with what I was beginning to recognize as his version of tenderness: complete attention, the body quiet, the eyes holding.
"They're settling in," Diego told me, switching to English. "Ernesto says the beds are good. Ana asked if the kitchen was always this loud." The corner of his mouth twitched. "I told her it was Irish's fault."
"It is Irish's fault," I replied, and the warmth that moved through me when he almost-smiled had nothing to do with the food.
Dinner was surprisingly delicious. The noise in the kitchen grew as the meal went on—more voices, more Spanish mixingwith English, a room full of more than fifty people, more than half of those beginning, tentatively, to believe that the walls around them were protection rather than containment.
One by one, the others left. Tank and Tyler first, Tank's massive hand resting on Tyler's lower back as they walked out. Ghost drifted out with a plate, eating while walking. Irish cleaned with the same chaotic energy he cooked with, Nolan and Declan assisting—the three of them moving around each other in a choreography that looked practiced, intimate in a way I was beginning to understand wasn't accidental.
The workers retired to their rooms in small groups, guided by members I didn't know by name. Mateo was the last to leave. He paused at the doorway, looked back at Diego, and said something in Spanish too quiet for me to catch. Diego's response was a single word. The boy nodded and walked out.
The kitchen emptied. The noise faded. The lights stayed on, the fluorescent hum filling the space the voices had left, and then it was just us. Two men at a table with empty glasses.
Diego's eyes met mine across the table. The brown steady. The jaw relaxed for once—not locked, not carrying the tension that had been there since the bar. Something had shifted during the ride home, during the sleep, during the evening watching his language build a bridge between terrified workers and a kitchen full of strangers.
"You slept?" His voice was low. The kitchen empty around us but the volume making it feel smaller.
"Through the whole day. You?"
"Most of it." He turned his empty glass on the table. The same motion from The Junction. "First time in a while I didn't dream."
"What do you usually dream about?"
He looked at me. "The border. My mother's crossing. Not that I could remember—I wasn't even born yet—but my brain likes to punish me through imagination." A pause. "You."
The wordyousat between us on the table like a live wire.
"I dream about you too," I told him. "Have for six years. It's inconvenient."
The ghost of a smile. Real, warm, breaking through the composure suddenly—a flash that transformed his face and was gone.
