I told him I wasn’t hiding a cartel assassin behind my winter coat.
He told me I didn’t own a winter coat.
Unfortunately, he was correct.
The first night, I slept on an air mattress with a rolled-up hoodie for a pillow and woke up twice because the quiet felt different. Not bad. Just unfamiliar. No upstairs neighbor dragging furniture across the ceiling. No sirens. No radiator banging like a haunted boiler. Just the building settling, desert wind at the windows, and my own brain being dramatic.
By day three, I bought a mini cactus for the living room windowsill.
It was round, spiky, and came in a tiny blue pot from a shop near the plaza. I named it Judith because it looked judgmental. It was the first thing I bought that wasn’t necessary. Not food. Not gas. Not cat litter. Not cleaning supplies.
Just something alive.
That felt dangerous in a way I did not want to examine.
Regan returned Bandit two days after I moved in. She showed up in a dusty SUV with Savannah behind the wheel, Bandit’s crate in the back, and a bag of cat supplies so excessive it looked like the animal had won a divorce settlement.
“He has a rabies shot,” Regan announced. “And a flea treatment. And ear drops. And he only made the vet tech bleed once.”
Bandit hissed from the crate.
“Growth,” I said.
Regan handed me a paper bag. “Food. Toys. Brush. Treats. Collar.”
I pulled out a fancy green collar with a tiny bell on it.
Bandit stared through the crate bars like I had betrayed the revolution.
“Oh, he’s going to hate this,” I said.
“He already does,” Savannah said. “That’s how you know it fits.”
I gave him the spare bedroom because I had not lost all survival instincts. He had a big windowsill, a litter box, food, water, and three toys he ignored in favor of shredding the cardboard corner of the scratching pad. He was litter box trained, which seemed like a miracle considering he still looked at me like indoor plumbing was a personal insult.
Every morning, he sat on the windowsill and glared at the world he used to roam.
Every night, he hissed when I came in to feed him.
It was our routine.
I respected consistency.
The work phone dinged.
Turn right in two miles.
I changed lanes and glanced at the field kit in the backseat. Cooler. Sample bottles. Labels. Nitrile gloves. Portable meter. Chain-of-custody forms. Everything neat. Everything clean. Everything ready.
This was the part of my life I understood.
Santa Fe itself still felt like I had wandered into someone else’s story. People knew people here. Not casually. Intensely. Names carried weight. Coffee orders had gossip attached. Half the town seemed to know Regan, and the other half knew someone who owed the Royal Bastards either a favor, a warning, or a casserole dish.
The coffee shop on Main became my first real problem.
Regan had told me to go there. I had planned to stop once, mostly out of obligation, and then never again because I was not trying to be absorbed into some turquoise-wearing, biker-adjacent ecosystem.
Unfortunately, the cappuccino was perfect.
