Roger doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even move.
“Roger.”
Alice walks around his chair. He's so quiet and still, it's unnerving. When his stare remains on the TV screen, she waves the spoon to get his attention.
“Roger, what is it?”
His eyes, when they do finally sweep up to hers, widen. Panic grips her immediately.
The spoon slips from her fingers onto the carpet. She reaches for the remote still perched on the arm of his recliner to press mute. The room falls silent except for the faint bubbling of pots in the kitchen and the ragged sound of his breathing.
Roger sits rigid, shoulders tense. One of his hands is resting against his chest as if steadying himself. His breathing is not quite right. Each inhale comes a touch too shallow, each exhale a little too controlled, as though he is trying to mask some discomfort.
“Roger?” Alice’s voice cracks even though it is a mere whisper.
Then she sees it.
The veins along his neck and forearms look darker than they should, faintly raised beneath the skin like shadows trapped there. His chest moves in an unsteady rhythm up and down, a slight hitch at the top of each breath, subtle enough that anyone else might miss it but unmistakable now that she’s standing so close.
Alice’s knees give out. She drops in front of him and clutches his legs.
“No.” The word breaks in her throat. “No. No. It’s not true. It’s not here yet.”
She pushes herself upward, wrapping her arms around his middle, pressing her face against him as if holding him tightly enough might push any sickness away.
“You can’t leave me. Roger, please. I don’t care what they say. You’re not sick. It’s not true.”
But this close, she hears how, in just a few hours, his breathing has changed drastically. There’s a rattle to it that wasn’t there this morning. It comes right there at the end of each exhale.
Alice squeezes her eyes shut, tears flooding them.
“I refuse to believe it,” she whispers, but the words feel false, like ash in her mouth.
Juarez, Mexico
People always think anger came first. It didn’t. It was the grief.
The rally takes place behind the old maquiladora where Julio used to work when he was nineteen. Before it closed. Before the boss fled back to Texas and left two hundred families with nothing but severance slips they couldn’t read and promises he never intended to keep.
Now the lot is filled with men who look like him. Men wearing masks of anger across their faces. Men who have bled for another country, and this city. Men who have buried daughters and cousins and fathers because the world never cared enough to ask why they were destitute or dying.
Torches line the perimeter, casting long shadows across the concrete. Flags of Juarez hang from metal rods. There is a charge in the air, something sharp enough to taste.
His brother, Alejandro, steps forward. The crowd shifts, hungry for his voice. He lifts a hand, and silence drops heavy.
He presses that same hand flat to his chest, then curls it into a fist and strikes once over his heart. He repeats the motion again and again.
A steady, deliberate beat.
His gaze sweeps over them, and Julio sees it—the weight he carries. Grief sharpened into something harder. Something dangerous.
“Están aquí porque, como yo… ya están cansados.”
You’re here because, like me… you’re tired.
A few heads nod.
“Cansados de trabajar hasta que la espalda les duela y las manos sangren… y que nunca sea suficiente.”
