"He passed away this morning," she says. "Heart attack. I'm sorry for your loss."
I thank her. I ask the relevant questions. I write down the number for the funeral administrator and the case reference and the name of the hospital social worker. When I hang up I look at the number I've written. Then I look at the wall.
Nothing.
Not grief — I don't know what I expected grief to feel like, for him, but I expected something. Relief, maybe. Or rage.Something with mass. Instead there's just the fact: Rodrigo Cruz is dead. The man who built my childhood around fear has had a heart attack in the house I haven't seen in years, and he's gone, and I don't feel anything.
I pick up the phone and make the next calls.
Cremation. No viewing. No open casket — there's no one who needs to see his face for closure, least of all me. No service. The house goes to an estate agent. I give the administrator the relevant financial information and tell him I'll handle everything remotely.
My voice is level throughout. Each decision is crisp. Death is just another thing to handle.
When the last call ends, I sign two documents that have been waiting on my desk, and I notice my hands are shaking.
A fine tremor, barely visible, working through my fingers as I press the pen to paper. I look at it. Press harder. The tremor doesn't stop. I close my hand around the pen and hold it still through force of will, and finish signing.
The documents go in the outbox. The pen goes back in the drawer.
I look at my hands. Flat on the desk. The tremor still there, smaller, but there. I have not seen them do this. Not when the oncologist gave Jorge his number. Not when Jorge died. Not in nine years.
Jimmy appears in the doorway with a tablet and the evening's staffing update. I move my hands to my lap before he reaches the desk. He doesn't ask if I'm all right. He's smart enough not to. I give him fifteen minutes I can spare and three decisions he needs.
When he leaves I pull up the accounting file. The one that's almost telling me which of the eight names is the mole. The one I should be inside of for the next four hours.
I read the first column. The numbers don't land.
I read it again. The figures exist. The columns are where I left them. My attention slides off all of it.
I close the file.
The memory arrives without my permission. My father's front door. The weight of footsteps in the hall. The specific quality of silence that meant tonight would be a bad one. I am seven years old, possibly eight, standing in the kitchen with a glass of water in my hand because I have learned that if I am holding something useful when he comes in I am less likely to be his first thought.
I am thirty years old, alone in my office, and my hands won't stop shaking.
I sit at the desk for a long time after that.
Eventually I go upstairs.
My apartment is exactly as I left it. Spare, controlled, everything in its place. Jorge called it a monk's cell once, said without cruelty:you live like a man who doesn't trust himself to accumulate anything.He wasn't wrong.
I stand at the window.
The shaking comes in waves. Not constant — it ebbs and returns, ebbs and returns. I'm not crying. I don't cry. But my hands won't be still, and underneath the stillness, something has loosened. Something I've held tight for thirty years is letting go, and I can't pull it back.
His voice surfaces now. The front door. That was always the first signal: the weight of his footsteps in the hallway, telling you which version was coming before it arrived.
Show fear at the wrong moment and that's a target. Show nothing and sometimes that's a provocation. The only answer is to become a closed system. Give nothing back. Make yourself invisible.
I learned that young. I became very good at it.
The man I built from that template has held together for thirty years. Has managed empires and Jorge's illness and Marisol's wildness and Gabriel's absence and violent men and his own worst instincts.
My father's gone. And I don't feel free — that's what I couldn't have anticipated. I thought his death would feel like something unlocking. Instead the lock is still there and the door has just disappeared, and I have nothing left to push against.
My hands won't stop.
I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up again.
