Written in red — lipstick, or something thicker, something darker, something I've decided not to identify too precisely — is an address in block letters, precise and unhurried. Below the address: a time.9 PM.Below that, nothing. No signature, no explanation, no softening of the message with context. Just where and when, delivered on my mirror in something the color of blood.
He was here. While I was walking through Wynwood, while I was not clicking through to my father's life and missing Lori Yates and standing in front of murals that made my chest ache, he came into this apartment that he told me was mine and wrote on the mirror. Proved, again, that there is no space he can't access, no door he can't open, no life I can carve out that falls outside his radius.
Proved, again, that I can’t trust him.
Something moves through me — quick and hot, a flicker of fury for a single unguarded second. The apartment he told me was mine. My mirror. He was in here while I was out, touching things, leaving marks, reminding me that this is mine in name only.
I turn.
On the back of the bathroom door, hanging from a hook I hadn't noticed before, is a dress. Red. Chosen to match the handwriting on the mirror. Silk, clearly, even from here; the fabric catches the bathroom light and holds it the way cheap fabric can't.
I reach out and touch the hem.
Cool and impossibly smooth against my fingertips. The dress weighs nothing. It would fit like water.
Suddenly, I want to wear it. Where did that desire come from?
My size. He knows my size because of course he does. He chose this for me — chose the color, chose the cut. This isn't an invitation. Invitations come with exits built in. This is a command, but that doesn't stop me from touching the silk again.
I look at myself in the mirror, underneath his red handwriting.
The woman looking back at me has color in her face that she didn't have a week ago. Her eyes are awake in a way they haven't been in a long time. She looks, against all evidence and reason, like she is somewhere rather than nowhere.
I take the dress off the hook.
He might lie to me, change the rules, and might even intend to actually hurt me. But even so, I’ll meet him.
Of course I will.
10 - Logan
The VIP section has a sightline to the main door. I know this because I designed the sightlines myself, three years ago, when we renovated the mezzanine level and I stood on the empty floor with the architect and said:from here, I need to see everything.He’d thought I meant for security purposes.
I wait at the table I always use. My drink is in front of me, barely touched. The club is in full operation — the stage lit, the bar three deep, the sound system threading jazz through the noise of two hundred people having the kind of night they'll talk about for months. La Sirena at peak capacity is its own organism. I've spent nine years learning its rhythms. I know exactly where I am in relation to every exit, every camera, every staff member on the floor tonight. This is my kingdom, built from Jorge's blueprints and my own compulsive need to control every variable within its walls.
I cannot stop watching the door.
I sat with what I did last night. That's the honest version of the last eighteen hours — not processing, not resolving, just sitting with it, in the parking garage and then at my desk, doing the accounting the way I do all accounting: carefully, without flinching from the numbers. The man in the parking garage with his shaking hands was real. So was the decision I made this morning, which is that I'm not going to let it be the last time she sees me. Whether that makes me pragmatic or something worse, I've decided I'm done asking.
What I haven't decided is what this is. What she is. What I'm doing by sending her my address.
This is a mistake. The arrangement was supposed to stay separate: fear on one side of the wall, the rest of my life on the other. Clean. Containable. The box I put her in sitting nowhere near La Sirena, or the Delgados, or any of the forty other things that actually require my attention. I built that separation deliberately. Bringing her here breaks it.
I told myself it was practical: I can't keep disappearing. Can't leave the floor without explanation. If she's going to continue — and apparently she is, because I haven't ended it — then she needs to exist somewhere I can actually be. Not across the city. Here. Close.
That's the practical version.
The truth is simpler and worse: I wanted her here. Wanted to look up from a conversation and see her in the room. The want arrived without permission and I've been pretending it's logistics ever since.
I know this is how control breaks down — in small surrenders, each one reasonable in isolation. You give your name. You add a note to a mirror. You send an address. You tell yourself it's practical. And then you're sitting in the VIP section of your own club watching the door like a needy boyfriend.
The bass moves through the floor. At the bar, someone laughs loud enough to carry over the music. My drink is getting warm.
My phone is face-down on the table. Gunner's last message is still unactioned since this afternoon: a follow-up on the dock worker the Zayas approached last week. The worker held, declined, reported it up through the right channels. Gunner's people have been watching his building since. The Zayas don't abandon a thread; they find a different way to pull it. I've been building contingencies around that assumption all day, whenI've been able to think about it at all. The mole hunt and the Zayas pressure are the same problem from different angles, and the traps are set, and there is nothing left to do tonight except wait for something to move.
I adjust two degrees in my chair. Not because I'm uncomfortable, but because stillness is something I have to consciously maintain tonight. That alone tells me everything about where I am.
She walks through the door in red, and the room doesn't notice. No pause in the music. No heads turning. Just two hundred people continuing their evenings while I stop breathing for a moment. The dress moves with her the way I knew it would — silk finding the shape of her, the dip of her waist, the line of her hip. Her hair is up, which I didn't anticipate, and it does something to her neck I have to look away from.
