The drive into Doral is all sodium-lamp sameness and warehouse grid—nothing to chew on, nothing that chews back.
She threads the frontage road and lets the address pull her like a magnet until Prestige Auto Glass floats up on a square concrete box with the personality of a filing cabinet.
The building wears a sun-faded banner: PRESTIGE AUTO GLASS — INSURANCE FRIENDLY.
Three roll-up bays face the asphalt like eyelids: A, B, C stenciled in block font above corrugated metal.
A's up halfway, forklift scars chewed into the threshold; B's shut and padlocked; C sits down but not latched, a thumb's width of darkness under the rubber lip. A strip of tinted office windows runs along the right, cheap blinds crooked, a door with a buzzer and a peel-off "DELIVERIES IN REAR" arrow.
Up inside, a catwalk-thin mezzanine office juts over Bay C—plexi window, desk lamp glow, a corkboard with paper clutter, the outline of a mini-split AC unit drooling condensate into a stained bucket.
Dome cameras blink lazy red in two corners; a fake owl perches on the gutter and fools exactly no one.
Outside, the lot is a patchwork of oil blooms and glass dust.
A pallet of laminated windshields leans under a tarp, edges banded, reflecting the world in slivered funhouse.
Dumpsters squat behind a chain-link fence choked with trumpet vine.
A blue Sprinter with its company wrap sun-peeled (COASTAL AUTO CARE) nosedives at the curb; a white F-150 idles with the tick tick of cooling manifolds.
Farther out, an empty food truck—TAQUERÍA DEL SOL—sleeps in the corner like a dead whale. Somewhere behind the block, a forklift beeper chirps its three short notes and then quits.
She parks two lots down in the shadow slice between a busted streetlight and a transformer box tagged in silver.
From here she sees the bays straight on, but anyone looking back will get glare off her visor and the long, harmless silhouette of a bike that might belong to a courier killing time.
She kills her headlight but leaves the position lamp a breath above dead so she doesn't look like a stakeout, and drapes her jacket to break the tank's shine.
Screen brightness to minimum. Reflection turned to mirror.
People come and go on a slow, believable cadence.
Two techs in matching gray shirts roll a glass rack from a box truck into A—gloves, suction cups, the shuffling ballet of men who've learned to carry breakable sky.
A guy in a Dolphins cap smokes at the corner, phone to ear, spitting once without thinking; his sneaker toe taps triple-time against the curb.
A woman with a clipboard and a barcode gun walks the pallets, popping labels with the indifferent focus of someone already over it.
A short man in a linen shirt and too-clean loafers steps out of the office door, says something to Dolphins Cap, gestures at Bay C with two fingers like he's flicking ash, then disappears back up the mezzanine stairs.
She notes gait, height, the way the chain under his collar flashes once.
Not him. Not yet.
She splits her attention the way her jobs taught her: one eye on the roll-ups, one eye on the glass in her hand.
— [u at the mall yet?]
A bubble after a beat:
— [we're in. footlocker first then maybe journeys they might have the black stripe vans in 6.5]
— [stay in the lit aisles. pick 2 max. text sizes + price. i pay.]
— [bossy. noted. af1s squeak like mice btw]
She lets the corner of her mouth hint at a smile, then pockets it.
A white box truck backs to Bay C so close the dock seal kisses its doors.
The mezzanine light brightens.
Someone kills the radio inside; the lot's noise shifts shape.
— [who's nic o to u]
Three dots, then:
— [n i c o. he's cool. he knows the shoe wall guys]
— [answer the question]
— [he's my friend]
— [friends don't put hands on your waist in front of doors]
A longer pause.
She watches Linen Shirt cross Bay A with a clipboard, talk to the Sprinter driver, show two fingers again—two hours? two pallets? Two of something.
— [he asked if he could. i said yes. u don't need to explode]
— [i'm not exploding. i'm asking]
— [k]
"K" is a white flag she doesn't trust. She swallows commentary and logs trucks: Coastal Sprinter pulls out; F-150 slides into its spot.
A silver Corolla nose-dives toward the side gate, pauses, backs up, parks under the camera like it knows what it's doing.
— [af1s $110 vans $70. Which]
— [the pair you'll actually wear. try both. walk. send pics]
Three images roll in—mirror angles, tile floor, her sister half-smirking in white, then black-stripe.
The white make her look like the hall belongs to her; the Vans make her look like she's about to leave Florida.
— [white first. stripe next paycheck]
— [copy. nic o says good taste]
— [nico can say bye]
Dots.
Then nothing for a handful of beats, just a forklift's hydraulic hiss and the smell of resin.
She clocks a skinny man in a tracksuit slip through Bay C's person door with a slim duffel—no logo, no decals—reappearing two minutes later without it.
The mezzanine shadow shifts. The Saint medallion does not yet show.
— [i gotta go pay. i'll text total. luv u]
— [stay with crowds. send receipt. love you back]
She should lock the screen. She doesn't.
Thumb drifts, muscle memory opening a thread she has no business inside. PAPÁ sits pinned where it always has, above the living, a little monument made of blue bubbles and dates.
The header photo is still the one Sofia took at the beach—Rafael squinting into sun, hat crooked, his smile fighting with whatever he was hiding even then.
Scroll.
— [u want pan con bistec or medianoche? im passing sergios]
— [bistec! extra papitas. pls pls]
— [ok pequeña ladrona of my paycheck]
— [luv u]
— [love u more. study the fractions, deal?]
A week later laid next to it like nothing could ever puncture weeks:
— [storm coming. bike stays in the garage tonight. i'll pick u up if rain]
— [i can ride. im waterproof]
— [nope. my job is to ruin your fun with being alive later]
A fox emoji follows because he liked it, didn't understand it, kept sending it anyway.
Scroll.
A photo of a lopsided science fair trifold—marker headlines bleeding, too many glitter stars.
— [3rd place 😊]
— [robbery. should've been 1st. proud of u. celebratory pastelito run tomorrow?]
— [yes.]
Scroll.
— [i'm late, mija. double shift turned into triple. eat the pasta in the fridge. do NOT feed sophia gummies for dinner]
— [we already ate. saved u some. come home safe]
— [i will. save me a hug too]
Scroll.
— [you want me at the recital or the game? both at 6. life is rude]
— [game. i only do the group bow lol]
— [deal. i'll clap loud enough for ballet too.]
Scroll.
The one that detonates something soft behind her ribs:
— [took the day, mija. just you and me.]
— [yay! park then foood]
— [food first. then park. rules of the universe]
The warehouse air moves around her—forklift chirp, a bay door rattling, a box truck brake hiss—and she hears none of it.
The glow of the screen scalds her eyes in the dim slice she's chosen.
Her throat works around nothing.
Memory drapes itself over the asphalt like heat.
A dumb meme he sent at 1 a.m.—a cat in sunglasses over text that said HATERS GONNA HATE—and her — [omg stop ur old] and his — [rude. i am timeless].
— [need anything from publix]
— [milk eggs cereal. the good cereal.]
— [define good cereal]
— [the one with the tiger duh]
— [not food. sugar sculpture]
— [plssssss]
— [fine. small box. don't tell mom.]
The tape of then runs clean until it doesn't.
The last blue bubble lands and the next one never did.
Silence occupies whole months like a tenant that won't pay and won't leave.
Her thumb hovers over Older Messages, twitches, retreats.
The ache in her chest is back, not sharp, just dense, as if someone set a book there and told her to balance it forever.
She breathes around it.
The phone gets heavier in her hand until it feels like she's holding a brick instead of glass.
She scrolls up one more time without reading, stops on his fox, and stares until it means nothing.
Enough.
She kills the screen.
The reflection that looks back is just a dark oval, a crack of pale across it where the visor splits the world, and her eyes trying not to be two small, wet things inside a larger, harder one.
She pockets the phone like you put a picture back on a shelf you shouldn't have touched.
She lets stillness wear her like a jacket. From here the bays are a diorama—sheet-metal eyelids, a mezzanine glow, men in gray walking frames of glass like they're carrying slices of weather.
Her body does the job of watching—the long, low peripheral scan; the count of trucks and hands; the casual inventory of cameras and blind spots—while her mind unsheathes the knife it keeps for quieter work and points it at herself.
Is this raising or just managing?
She's turned love into logistics: rides, receipts, dressings changed on schedule, water shoved at a stubborn mouth, rent paid on the last possible day like a magic trick repeated until it isn't.
She keeps Sofia alive by subtraction—remove risk, reduce exposure, ration joy to safe servings. If you raise a kid without showing them the heat that made you, do they grow straight or do they turn brittle?
A plant overwatered rots; a plant ignored toughens, then dies quietly while looking fine. She knows all the metaphors and not a single answer.
She thinks of Rafael—how he left by staying until he didn't. Camila—how she stayed by leaving whenever there was a cost.
This is her fear scaffolded into policy: if she opens the valve even a quarter turn, the backlog will blow the seals; she will talk once for ten minutes and everyone in the room will drown; they will watch her reshape with the force of it and decide the smartest thing to do is move away.
She remembers the only time she tried to say anything real to her mother—how it became a debit to collect later.
She remembers the boy sophomore year who said — "I like girls who don't cry," and how good she got at being that kind of girl until she wasn't a girl in the sentence anymore, just a quiet solution.
Sofia laughs in a text thread and sends shoes.
Lucia audits her tone like a bank statement for fraud and finds nothing except youth and a new gravity orbiting it named Nico.
Control is the only dial she trusts; twist it down and the world stops burning; twist it up and no one moves unless you say.
That's the trick she learned in rooms where no one saved you unless you saved the room first.
She hates that the trick works best on her sister.
She hates that without it she's an ache with a wallet.
In her head she writes it like a set of rules on a chalkboard and then erases it by hand until her palm is gray: You cannot protect and be porous at the same time. If you thaw, you flood. If you starve, you calcify. Choose a failure.
She has chosen stone because stone doesn't leave. She knows stone leaves, it just takes longer, and calls it erosion.
Paranoia does her the favor of dressing like prudence.
She calls it OPSEC so the voice that runs her nights doesn't have to admit it's also the fear of being looked at and then cataloged and then discarded.
Useful gets you invited back; human gets you left on read.
When she imagines telling Sofia the truth—the whole bad inventory, the hotline, the ledger with no forgiving column—her chest tightens with a private, physical shame, like the body knows it would be obscene to put the weight on a kid who keeps trying to do cartwheels on a floor she mopped.
And yet there's a softer terror: that in teaching Sofia to live with the light off, she is building a door that looks like their father and a lock that sounds like their mother.
A forklift chirrups, three-beat complaint, and something inside her echoes it.
She catches herself counting again—trucks, men, movements—because counting is cleaner than feeling, because numbers don't ask why.
She recognizes the dodge and offers herself the ugly truth: the past isn't a shadow following; it's a room she never left.
Her biggest enemy sits in the mezzanine behind her eyes, moving pins on a corkboard with strings that lead to nobody but her.
She overthinks because it's safer than remembering; she remembers because it's safer than imagining a future; she imagines because the present is a machine that runs on regret.
Every day she wakes up and the first thing she does is choose not to want anything she can't carry alone.
A breeze noses along the lot.
Glass dust glitters. The catwalk lamp flickers once and steadies. She notes it because noticing is free.
Headlights cut across the far entrance and swing to a stop with the ease of someone who's parked here before.
Not a delivery; not a customer who needs a windshield at dinner.
Mid-2000s Lexus GS, flat gray wrap trying to be modest, ride height just a touch low, as if it's often full of what cars shouldn't carry. Tints heavy but legal enough to argue.
The car noses two spaces down from her shadow seam, facing the bays at an angle that reads like habit. Engine stays on a breath, then dies; cabin light does not come up.
He sits a beat before the door opens, as if finishing a text or waiting for a line to ring.
When he steps out, she has him measured from the first second.
Six foot, give or take a complaint, lean through the middle, shoulders rolled from lifting what paperwork doesn't mention.
Close-cropped hair, scalp shining where Florida wins.
Left cheek bears a thin, pale stroke—two centimeters like the file promised, not decorative, not fresh, just the story of a bottle once.
A nickel chain glints against collarbone and drops the small round of Saint Nicholas from his shirt when he leans to pocket the key; it swings once, lazy—icon face lightning-caught.
Watch on the right wrist, steel, not brand-flashy; shoes that care about grip more than applause.
He checks the lot with a glance that kisses corners and cameras the way a good dog checks fences.
He doesn't go in.
He slides back into the driver's seat, door cracked, and brings a phone to his ear.
Mouth shapes around a language she could almost catch if the wind helped—Russian's blunt music or Ukrainian's steelier cadence; she files the vowels.
Free hand touches the medallion once like a man who won't call it superstition.
He watches Bay C the way you watch a throat you're about to put your fingers on.
She flips the seat latch again, not because there's anything new inside but because ritual steadies her hands.
No bat. Of course no bat. Even if she had it, where would it ride in a trunk built for a rain shell and a rag? Dumbass. Fine. Make do.
The rag is an old T-shirt, gray with former life, corners frayed into little tongues. She wraps it over her dominant hand, palm to knuckles, then laces the loose end around the metal buckle of her helmet's chin strap—instant sap.
Glass hates hard, small edges; it hates surprise.
She keeps the visor down. Identity is a luxury you don't give away.
Lot quiets to a vibration.
Lexus: driver's window up; Ark's profile quartered by the A-pillar; phone near his mouth; chain glinting when he nods.
She walks without rush, the gait of a woman heading to ask for a jump.
Cameras live in the corners—the dome over Bay B, the fake owl's dead marbles—she keeps her head angled so all they get is matte and a seam of cracked polycarbonate. Smokers notice confidence, not faces; nobody's smoking.
She posts at the driver's door.
The rag muffles the jangle of the buckle against her glove. The trick with tempered side glass is you don't hit the middle; you pick the corner where the stress lines tie their knots.
She kisses the buckle to the lower rear of the pane—tap—then a sharper peck with a little wrist in it. The window turns white like frost and falls in on itself with a sound like a thousand tiny marbles.
Cube confetti rains into Ark's lap, across the door card, onto the seat.
He recoils, hand coming up too slow.
Lucia reaches through the glitter and drives the rag-wrapped knuckles across the cheek with the thin scar.
Bone talks to bone; his head snaps into the headrest and drops right back, mouth open on a curse that stays in his throat. Saint Nicholas leaps and lands.
No warning. She thumbs the lock, yanks the rear door, and pours into the back seat before his nervous system chooses a plan.
The Lexus smells like citrus detailer and gun oil someone hoped would pass for anything else.
She collapses behind him, knee climbing into the gutter between seat and tunnel, one hand already fishing for the shoulder belt.
Click.
Belts are obliging snakes.
She drags the webbing across his clavicle, loops it once below his jaw, then drapes it high over the carotids, not the windpipe—front of throat is a mess; side of neck is a switch.
The belt's texture bites; the reel pays out another inch with a polite chk and stops. Inertia has her back; panic is heavy; physics is a friend.
She plants the sole of her boot against the back of the center console, braces, and draws the strap into a hard line, forearm wedged behind his head like a lever.
He thrashes once on instinct—hand going for the belt, elbow hunting ribs.
She gives the line a tighter angle, pinning his wrist between his own chest and the webbing so his fingers grope air.
Headrest posts box his skull; window frame blocks the other side; she's made his world a funnel and he's reaching into the narrow end.
His phone skitters onto the floor mat. He makes a sound with no vowels.
— "Arkady," she says, breathing slow so he'll hear his options in it.
— "Supplier. Handler. Warehouse that feeds you. Say the names. Say the schedule."
He tries to tuck his chin, the wrong move; it opens the side of his neck into the strap. His heels drum the firewall.
She draws the belt another quarter inch and feels the pulse under the webbing stutter.
Eight seconds to stars.
Ten to nap. She counts because counting keeps the other thing from standing up inside her and asking to be let out.
— "You have maybe fifteen before your lights dim," she adds, factual.
— "Tell me the road your guns travel. Who loads them. Where the truck sleeps."
He manages one choked syllable that could be fuck in any language. He claws for the buckle at his hip; inertia retractor holds proud.
His right hand scrabbles toward his left pocket—habit says weapon; she rides his motion, locks the wrist with her forearm, and levers the belt higher to kiss his jaw hinge.
Teeth click.
The seat creaks; the Lexus complains in leather.
— "Don't reach," she says, and sharpens the line.
— "Name. Then address. Then night."
He shakes his head, which is how you say no when your breath is a rumor.
Spots have started crowding the edges of his vision; she can feel it in the softening, in the way fight turns into push.
The medallion thumps his sternum in a quick, panicked metronome; his eyes flick to the rearview and find only a matte black face with a seam for a mouth.
— "You make this easy, you wake up," she says.
— "You make this hard, you still wake up, but worse."
His fingers curl into the belt, slide, fail. He gurgles a syllable that could be a name or a prayer.
She could give him a sip of air as a treat, and she almost does—then remembers how men like him lie inside the first breath.
She keeps the pressure where it belongs: high, lateral, clean.
Physiology is blunt: starve the brain, it sleeps.
She times it—one, two, three—feels the throb under the strap wobble, feels his shoulders lose choreography, feels the jaw go slack as instinct burns down to pilot light. The fight drains from his hands first; the legs kick twice in stupid punctuation; the chest remembers an old rhythm and then forgets it in favor of the nap.
Seven, eight.
She eases nothing until his eyes roll white at the edges and the lids fail to find focus. Ten.
Ark's weight softens into the seat. The belt line stays taut for another heartbeat, then she lets it sigh a half-inch so the carotids don't forget to be rivers. She listens: parking lot hum, forklift far off, dome camera's lazy blink.
His breath scrapes back in with a small, wet sound. Out cold, not gone. She keeps the belt in her hands like a leash and waits for the world to notice something it won't.
When she's sure the only witness is the Saint tapping once more, she settles the strap against his neck, just firm enough to keep his nap obedient, and lets her own lungs find their easy count again.