Jorge. That's the name that surfaces first, the reflex of it — Jorge is the man I would have called. Jorge who paid for Wharton, who gave me a role, who watched me become myself. Jorge, who is dead. The grief I've been handling for weeks threads through this one. I'm not just fatherless. I lost both of them.
I can't burden Marisol or Gabriel, or any of the La Sirena crew with this. They're all still reeling from Jorge.
The list of people I can call runs out very fast.
I open a new message.
I type a string of numbers. The code for the staff entrance on the north side of La Sirena. Then the code for the private elevator — the one that bypasses the main building and goes to the residential floor above the club, the one that requires my explicit sign-off to program. Then the floor number.
I stare at it.
She has the penthouse code, the building access — those I gave her a week ago. These numbers are different. These are mine. The one part of this place that's entirely, only mine.
I don't know what I'm asking for. I don't know what I want her to do when she gets here, if she comes.
I send it anyway. Put the phone face-down on the table. Don't look at it again.
The elevator opens forty minutes later.
I'm still standing at the window. I hear the doors and I don't turn, because turning would require a face, and I don't have one ready. She moves quietly across the room and the couch settles behind me. She's sat down. I can see her reflection in the dark glass: knees pulled up slightly, both hands in her lap, those gray eyes finding my back and staying there.
She waits.
The city lights track their patient movement below. My hands are still doing the thing I can't stop them doing. I watch her watching me in the glass.
I turn.
"My father died today."
She doesn't say she's sorry, and I'm grateful for it.
"Heart attack," I say. "This morning."
She nods. Receives it. Holds it.
I keep going, still staring out over the city, my back to her.
"He was unpredictable." The word is clinical and I'm choosing it deliberately, because it's the version I can say out loud. "Not constantly violent. That would have been — you could map constant. Prepare for it. The randomness was worse. You never knew which version was walking through the door."
She listens. Remains still.
"I learned to show nothing." I stop. Start again. "Give him no reads. No fear, no anger, nothing he could use." A pause where I glance at her reflection in the dark glass. "I was very young when I figured that out."
She waits.
"The fear—" I stop. The sentence doesn't have a direct route to where it's going. "Something happened to it. To the fear. Somewhere in all those years of reading him, of surviving by watching and showing nothing." I look at my hands. Still shaking.
"What happened to it?" she finally asks, her voice soft.
"It sank into me," I tell her. "Made me crave it in others. He made me what I am — the monster who wants to see fear on someone else's face. Be unreadable. Hold all the power. He planted the evil inside me. All of it."
She doesn't tell me that's not true.
She doesn't reach for the easier version — doesn't offeryou're not himoryou chose differentlyor any of the reframings that would let me off the hook and mean less than nothing. She sits on my couch in the low light of my carefully controlled apartment and she holds what I've given her without flinching and without trying to reshape it into something more palatable.
She stays with all of it. Doesn't move, doesn't speak, doesn't do anything that would make this about her.
"The arrangement," I say, and stop. Try again. "What I do. What I need. I've told myself it's contained. That asking is different from taking." I shake my head. "But it was planted by him. Everything I am was planted by him, and he's dead now and I can't be angry at him and I can't grieve him and I can't —"
