I'm standing in the road in front of God, Marco, and a woman I killed in my own head, coming apart at the seams like a cheap shirt.
I can't stop looking at her mouth.
She watches all of it happen.
She doesn't move. She doesn't look away. She stands there with her hands where I can see them, and she lets me have every second of it, and there's nothing on her face at all.
That's the part that gets in.
Not the freckle. Not the ten years. Her face, while she watches me break in half in the middle of a road.
Nothing on it.
Then she takes one step forward. "Hello, Finn," she says.
CHAPTER TWO
Mila
The wind's been coming at my back for two hours, and I stopped feeling my hands somewhere around the sixth mile.
Doesn't matter. I need my feet, not my hands.
The man on the gate is a cartel soldier.
I knew it from four hundred yards out, from the way he came out of the block hut to look at me and then went back in and didn't come out again.
Club men need to know what you are. Cartel men already know, they're only working out whether you're worth the walk.
He's been watching me through the glass for eleven minutes.
I keep my hands out of my pockets. I keep my feet where they are.
I don't look at the fence and I don't look at the road behind me, because the second you look at the way out they know you're thinking about it, and a woman thinking about it is a woman who came here to do something.
I have come here to do something. He doesn't need to know that yet.
Then there's a shape coming up the gravel and my body knows before my eyes do.
He's bigger.
That's what my brain reaches for.
Ten years and it hands mehe's bigger, like a coin dropped down a well.
He's filled out through the shoulders and the neck, and he's got a beard now. There's gray in it at the corner of his jaw where he used to get razor burn he'd complain about like a dying man.
Gray. In his beard.
My back teeth come together and I let them.
He's walking fast. There's a red stripe up his forearm that's bleeding and I’m not sure if he knows it.
Twenty feet, then fifteen.
For eight months I've had to think about this moment. To build it with my bare hands.
I built it on my mother's kitchen floor with my hand flat on the linoleum where she died.
