I honestly wasn’t sure. I dug through the details of the contract, of the test results he’d handed back, tried to remember his birth year…
It was a guess, but I tried it anyway. “Ten years?”
She absorbed this the way she absorbed most information, which was thoroughly and without immediate visible reaction.
"He's established," I said.
"He's established," she repeated, in the tone that meant she was not necessarily disagreeing.
"He owns land. He's?—"
"I can see what he is." She said it without heat. Just observation. Then she looked at me the way she'd been looking at me my whole life, the way that saw everything. "You like him."
"We're—it's early."
"Mija."
"It's a complicated situation?—"
"You like him," she said again, quieter this time. Not a question.
I thought about the parking lot. The tailgate.Everything.The spreadsheet in his back pocket that I hadn't noticed him take until it was gone.
"Yeah," I said. "I think I do."
She made a sound—not satisfied exactly, not worried exactly, somewhere in the complicated middle territory that only Catholic mothers occupied.
"He found you first," she said. "When he walked in. Before me, before your father." A pause. "A man who walks into a room and finds you first?—"
"Mamá—"
"I'm just saying what I saw." She patted my cheek once, brief and warm. "Go help them."
The loading took twenty minutes.
Gage and Sawyer worked with the easy efficiency of men who moved things regularly—no wasted motion, no discussion required, just a quiet system that emerged naturally between two people who knew how to work alongside each other. My dad inserted himself helpfully and got in the way in roughly equal measure, which Gage accommodated with a patience that I clocked and filed away. Daniela supervised from the doorway because she had a callback tomorrow and couldn't risk her shoulder, and my mom made two trips down to the parking lot carrying things she absolutely did not need to carry and that nobody stopped her from carrying because we all knew better.
I carried boxes and tried not to think about the fact that this was actually happening.
When the last box went into the trailer Sawyer latched it and checked it twice and my dad checked it a third time and then the four of them stood in the parking lot in the June heat looking at it like it had accomplished something, which I supposed it had.
I went back upstairs one last time alone.
The apartment was completely empty now. Just the carpet and the walls and the window with the morning light coming through it. Three years. The job I'd loved and lost, the plan I'd made and remade, the version of myself I'd been building quietly in this space without fully knowing what I was building toward.
I stood in the middle of the living room for a moment.
It's enough,I told it.It was enough.
Then I turned off the light and went back downstairs.
My mom was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
I knew from her face before I reached her. She had the expression she'd been trying not to have all morning—the one that lived underneath the helpfulness and the warmth and the blouse she'd pressed specifically for today. Her eyes were already bright.
"Mamá," I said.
"I'm not—" She waved a hand. "I'm fine."
