Page 1 of Bite for Sore Eyes

ONE

LANA

The afternoon light poured through the windows of Lana's studio apartment, casting shadows across her cluttered desk where three monitors displayed cascading lines of security code. She rubbed her temples, trying to ease the dull ache that had been building behind her eyes for the past hour from the blurred vision that sharpened unpredictably.

This wasn't how she'd imagined spending her thirty-fifth year. Hell, this wasn't how she'd imagined spending any year. The woman who once protected the nation's most critical digital infrastructure now struggled to complete basic freelance contracts from her cramped apartment in College Park. Two years of this rare progressive neural synchronization disorder had transformed her life into something unrecognizable.

"Inconvenient and annoying," she muttered to herself, the same phrase she'd been using since the diagnosis. It sounded better than "neurological condition affecting fewer than a dozen people worldwide." Certainly better than yesterday's prognosis echoing in her mind—approximately one year before her autonomic functions failed completely.

Her feet started to tingle, spreading up her calves like static electricity. She flexed her toes, willing the sensation to pass. But her hands joined the rebellion next, her fingertips going numb just enough to make typing frustrating. All while the blurred vision came and went in waves, turning the security protocols she'd written hundreds of times into indecipherable hieroglyphs.

Frustrated and spent, she saved her work and pushed back from the desk. The small apartment felt suffocating today, its walls closing in with the weight of everything she'd lost. Her NSA security clearance. Her relationship with Bryan—though she'd been the one to end that, convinced it was cruel to ask someone to build a future around a woman who might not have one. The long-term projects she'd devoted her career to, now passed on to colleagues who would never know she'd once been instrumental in designing them.

But the exhaustion wasn't just physical. It was the bone-deep weariness of fighting a battle no one understood, against an enemy that couldn't be defeated. Instead of throwing herself into code like she had every day for the past year, Lana reached for her phone.

Her father answered on the second ring, his voice warm but edged with concern. "Lana, what's wrong?"

She hadn't even spoken yet. That was the thing about fathers who'd raised their daughters alone—they developed supernatural abilities to detect distress without words.

"Just having one of those days, Dad. The vision thing is acting up again, and my hands feel like I've been sleeping on them wrong."

"I'm coming over with Chinese food."

"Dad, you don't need to⁠—"

"I'll be there in twenty minutes. Start picking out a movie. Something funny with a decent plot."

The line went dead before she could protest that she was fine, that she just needed to hear his voice, that he didn't need to drop everything and rush across town because his daughter was having another episode. But Miguel Morales had never been the type of man to accept protests when his family needed him.

Lana set the phone down and felt the first genuine smile she'd managed all day tug at her lips. This had been their tradition since she was eight years old and overwhelmed by her mother's absence. Takeout containers, terrible movies, and the simple comfort of being together without needing to fix anything or solve any problems. Just father and daughter, sharing space and laughter and the kind of peace that came from being loved exactly as you were.

She walked the few steps from her desk to the living area—the apartment's open floor plan made such transitions laughably short—and switched on the television. The remote felt slightly foreign in her tingling fingers, but she managed to navigate to the streaming service. A romantic comedy caught her attention, something light and predictable about a woman who inherits a bakery and falls for the grumpy contractor hired to renovate it.

Perfect.

Mindless, heartwarming, and guaranteed to make her father complain about unrealistic building codes while secretly enjoying every moment.

Twenty-three minutes later—her father had clearly encountered traffic—his familiar knock echoed through the apartment. She opened the door to find him holding two bags from Golden Dragon, her favorite Chinese restaurant since high school. His salt-and-pepper beard couldn't quite hide his smile, but she caught the way his brown eyes searched her face, cataloging every detail like he was memorizing her features.

"You brought enough food for six people."

"No, I brought enough food for my daughter who's been living on coffee and stubbornness for the past year."

Her father settled onto the small couch beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched, closer than necessary, really, but Lana didn't comment. She understood the impulse to hold tight to the people you loved when time felt uncertain.

She clicked play on the movie and opened the first container and found the lo mein noodles still steaming. The familiar scent of garlic and soy sauce filled the apartment, drowning out the clinical smell of the hand sanitizer she'd been using obsessively since her immune system became another thing to worry about.

"So this woman inherits a bakery," she explained as the opening credits rolled.

"Let me guess—she's a high-powered executive who's forgotten how to enjoy life, and the contractor is going to teach her about the simple pleasures of small-town living."

"You watch too many of these movies with me."

"I watch exactly the right amount of these movies with you."

The tingling in her hands was already starting to fade, and her vision had sharpened enough to read the subtitles when the characters mumbled. Her PNSD episodes rarely lasted more than a few hours, and the symptoms never left permanent damage. Small mercies in a condition that offered precious few.

On the screen, the bakery owner was arguing with the contractor about exposed brick versus drywall. Her father made appropriately indignant noises about building permits while stealing spring rolls from her container. Neither of them mentioned yesterday's appointment, the prognosis that hung between them like a sword waiting to fall. Neither of them discussed the future that had suddenly become frighteningly finite.