I work the list.
By eight I'm at La Sirena. The main floor is empty at this hour, chairs still inverted on tables from last night's closing clean, the stage dark.
Jimmy Polson is already at the staff desk when I walk past. Efficient, unobtrusive, already fielding the first calls from vendors expecting weekly order confirmations. He's been here three years. Does exactly what he's asked, nothing more and nothing less.
"Jorge Delgado passed away in the night," I tell him. I don't need to cushion the blow. Jimmy and Jorge weren't close. Hell, I don't even know if they ever met face-to-face.
He nods. "I know. The lawyers rang. They're requesting our copies of the trust documents by noon. I already called the florist about an arrangement."
"I'll handle it. Send everything about the estate directly to me."
"Yes, sir."
He disappears back into his function. I disappear into mine.
Jimmy appears again at some point — I'm aware of him peripherally, like weather — and sets a coffee on the edge of my desk without comment. Walks out.
I don't drink it.
The afternoon accumulates quietly, in layers.
More calls. Nico twice, then the estate lawyer, then three La Sirena vendors who've heard something and are asking sidewaysquestions I answer without answering. Staff filtering in for the evening shift, each of them carrying the silence of people who know and are waiting for someone to make it official. I make it official, briefly, without ceremony, because ceremony is a luxury and the club opens in two hours.
I haven't eaten. I notice it like I notice the untouched coffee — as a fact, not a complaint. My body is running on something that isn't food and isn't quite adrenaline anymore. My hands are still steady. The rest of me is less certain.
Upstairs, my apartment is exactly as I left it this morning: clean lines, everything in its place, nothing decorative, nothing accidental. I shower, and the hot water does something my body needed, but I don't linger. I stand in front of the mirror and look at myself the way I stood in Jorge's doorway — steady, taking stock — and I notice my hands are steady.
My pulse, however, is not.
I choose carefully. Dark trousers, a shirt that doesn't announce money but doesn't deny it either. Collar open two buttons. I want her to feel safe enough to stay and then not safe at all, and the calibration of that begins with how I look when she walks in.
I meet my own eyes in the mirror.
There he is.
My father ruled our house through the uncertainty of his moods — the randomness of it, which door he'd walk through on a given night. My mother learned to read him. I learned to read him. And somewhere in all that reading, something in me inverted. The fear I'd lived with became, in my hands, a different thing. Not something visited on me without permission. Something offered, contained, chosen.
Or so I tell myself.
The dark thing doesn't go away just because I built walls around it. I know that. What I don't know — what I've neverknown — is whether the container holds. Whether asking is just taking with better language.
I see his face when I look long enough.
I stop looking long enough.
Jorge believed in me. Paid for Wharton, handed me a role, watched me become someone who holds things together rather than breaking them. He saw something worth building.
Past tense. He's been past tense since approximately 4am, and I have spent the eleven hours since managing his affairs and not stopping long enough to let the shape of that land. Because if I stop it will hit me. If it hits me I can't function. If I can't function everything Jorge built starts to crack at the seams that only I know about.
So I seal it. Press it flat, lock it down, let everything else run over the top of it until the shape disappears.
But if I cancel tonight — if I let the crisis swallow this too, like every crisis has ever swallowed every private need — I will bury it. Completely. I'll seal it over it like everything else, and in five years it will still be there, pressurized and wordless. I'll still be the fixer. The pressure valve will be gone. Nothing will have changed except that I'll be five years further from ever letting any of it out.
I need this.
That's the truth I've been not-saying all day, through the funeral arrangements and stakeholder management. I need this the way I need the ocean at 5am — not for productivity, not for function, not for anyone else. Just for the one part of me that doesn't belong to La Sirena or the Delgados or the performance I've been running since I was nine years old.
I'm going.
