Chapter 2
The last customer left Sandy's at nine-fourteen, which was eleven minutes after Nina had stopped refilling his coffee and six minutes after she'd put his check on the table without being asked.
Carl Braddock had been nursing that cup since seven-thirty, working up the nerve to ask her out the way he did every other Wednesday, and she'd let him sit because the man tipped four dollars on a six-dollar tab and never once looked at her chest when he talked to her. Small mercies on the A1A dinner shift.
She locked the register, ran the tape, and tucked the night's deposit into the vinyl bank bag her grandmother had used since 1987.
Fourteen hours on her feet. The arches screamed, her lower back had opinions about the mop bucket, and the cut on her index finger from a broken coffee pot at lunch was throbbing under the Band-Aid she'd slapped on between the noon rush and the two o'clock lull.
Sandy's Diner looked the way it always looked at closing — half the overhead lights killed to save on the electric bill, chairs flipped on tables, the flat top scraped and oiled, her grandmother's cast iron cooling on the back burner.
The cracked vinyl booths that she'd reupholstered herself with YouTube tutorials and a staple gun.
The sign on A1A that buzzed and flickered because the transformer was dying and a new one cost eight hundred dollars she didn't have this month.
She loved every square inch of this place with the ferocity of a woman who'd almost lost it twice.
Nina grabbed her keys, killed the lights, and pushed through the back door into the parking lot.
Her Honda sat alone under the one security light that worked, the other three burned out because the landlord considered exterior lighting a suggestion rather than an obligation.
The ocean was two blocks east, and she could hear it — that constant low roar that was the soundtrack of every night she'd ever closed this place.
Three men were leaning against a black Escalade parked next to her car.
Her hand tightened on the keys, thumb sliding the longest one between her index and middle fingers the way her grandmother taught her at thirteen.
You won't do real damage, baby girl, but you'll do enough to run.
She didn't stop walking because stopping meant she'd already decided she was prey, and Nina Castellano didn't do prey.
Not for drunk customers, not for the health inspector who liked to stand too close, not for the three strangers in her parking lot at nine o'clock on a Wednesday night.
The one in the middle pushed off the Escalade and walked toward her. Lean, mid-thirties, moving with the easy confidence of a man who enjoyed this part of his job. He wore a fitted black shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and his smile was the kind that made the back of her neck go cold.
"Nina Castellano?"
"Kitchen's closed."
His smile widened. The two behind him didn't smile at all, which was somehow worse. "I'm not here to eat, sweetheart. My name's Marco. I work for a man named Leon Garza, and Mr. Garza would like to discuss a financial matter with you."
"I don't know any Garza."
"No, but your mother did." Marco stopped six feet from her, close enough that she could see the flat pleasure in his eyes. "Diane Castellano. Borrowed forty-two thousand dollars from an associate of Mr. Garza's back in 2016. That debt was purchased, and Mr. Garza is now the holder of record."
Nina's stomach dropped through her shoes. Her mother. Of course it was her mother. Eight years dead and still reaching up from the grave to drag Nina down with her.
"My mother's debts died with my mother."
"That's not how debt works, sweetheart."
"Don't call me sweetheart." The words came out harder than she intended, which was still not hard enough for this parking lot and these men and the reality settling over her like concrete.
"My mother died owing half the coast. I settled what I could with the estate, which was nothing, because she drank every cent she ever touched.
Whatever Garza bought, he bought worthless paper. "
Marco reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded document. He held it up but didn't offer it to her. "Signed promissory note. Your mother put up the diner as collateral."
The ground shifted under Nina's feet. Not physically — the asphalt was solid, the Florida night was warm, the ocean was still making its noise two blocks away — but something fundamental cracked in the architecture of her life. Sandy's. Her mother had leveraged Sandy's.
"That's not possible. The diner was in my grandmother's name—"
"Title transferred to Diane Castellano upon your grandmother's death in 2014.
Your mother signed this note seven months later.
" Marco's smile hadn't changed. It was the smile of a man who'd delivered this speech a hundred times and never got tired of watching faces fall.
"Mr. Garza doesn't want payments, Nina. He wants the property.
And he's prepared to be generous about the timeline — seventy-two hours to call and discuss terms."
"The diner is mine. I've held the title for eight years—"
"You hold a title encumbered by a signed lien.
" Marco stepped closer. Five feet now. She could smell his cologne — something expensive that didn't match the cruelty in his eyes.
"Mr. Garza has been patient. He sat on this note for years while your mother drank herself to death and you played restaurant.
But A1A beachfront is worth real money now, and patience has an expiration date. "
"Get off my property."
"It's not your property. That's the point.
" Marco tilted his head, studying her the way a kid studies a bug before pulling its wings off.
"Seventy-two hours, Nina. Call the number on this card, sit down with Mr. Garza like an adult, and maybe you walk away with enough to start over somewhere that isn't prime real estate. "
"I said get off my property."
Marco moved so fast she didn't have time to swing the keys.
His hand caught the back of her neck and drove her forward, slamming her face into the hood of her Honda with a force that turned the world white and then red.
She heard the crack before she felt it — her cheekbone hitting metal, the skin above her eye splitting like wet paper.
The pain arrived a half-second later, massive and absolute, flooding her vision with black sparks and turning her knees to water.
He held her there. Face pressed into warm metal, blood running into her left eye, his hand on the back of her neck with the casual pressure of a man pressing a button.
The parking lot was empty. A1A traffic slid past the diner without slowing, headlights sweeping the lot and moving on, and nobody was coming because nobody ever came.
"Seventy-two hours." His voice was close to her ear, calm as a weather report. "Next time, the diner takes the hit instead of your face. Mr. Garza would hate to see this place damaged, but business is business."
He let go. She caught herself on the hood with both hands, blood dripping onto the paint, and by the time she turned around, the three men were walking back to the Escalade like they'd just finished a cigarette break.
Marco opened the passenger door, paused, and tossed a business card onto the asphalt at her feet.
The Escalade pulled out of the lot and turned south on A1A, taillights disappearing into the stream of traffic like they'd never been there.
Nina stood in the parking lot for ninety seconds.
She counted them because counting was something she could do when the rest of her brain was a white noise of pain and fury and the taste of blood running from her split eyebrow into the corner of her mouth.
Ninety seconds to confirm her legs worked, her vision was clearing in the right eye if not the left, and that no one was coming back.
She picked up the business card. White card, black text. A phone number. Garza Holdings.
She drove herself home with one eye swelling shut, gripping the wheel hard enough to make her knuckles ache because if she loosened her hands she'd start shaking and if she started shaking she'd pull over and if she pulled over she'd fall apart in her car on the shoulder of A1A and Nina Castellano did not fall apart.
Not when her mother forgot to pick her up from school for the third day in a row.
Not when she found the eviction notice taped to the diner door two weeks after the funeral.
Not when the health inspector threatened to shut her down over a cracked tile she couldn't afford to replace.
She made it home — a two-bedroom rental three blocks from the beach that she'd lived in for six years and never bothered to decorate because the diner got all her money and all her attention. She locked the door, dropped her keys on the counter, and went to the bathroom.
The mirror was not kind. Her left cheekbone was already swelling purple, the skin above her eye split in a two-inch gash that was still bleeding sluggishly.
She'd need stitches. She wasn't going to get stitches, because stitches meant an ER and an ER meant questions and questions meant police and police meant exactly nothing on the A1A coast at ten o'clock on a Wednesday night.
She poured whiskey on the cut because that's what her grandmother would have done, bit down on a washcloth until the fire in her face faded to a roar, and closed the gash with butterfly bandages from the first-aid kit she kept stocked because a commercial kitchen was a place of knives and grease and burns.
Then she sat at her kitchen table with the business card in front of her and the whiskey bottle in reach and the numbers running through her head like a ticker tape — what the diner was worth, what she owed on it, what forty-two thousand dollars meant against a building her grandmother bought in 1979 for a price that wouldn't cover a month's rent today.
Her mother. Her goddamn mother.
Diane Castellano, who'd never met a bad decision she wouldn't make twice, who'd turned Sandy's legacy into a bar tab and a line of credit, who'd died in a rented room in Holly Hill with a blood alcohol level that made the coroner's eyebrows climb.
Eight years dead, and she'd found one last way to take everything Nina had built.
Nina stared at the card until the numbers blurred. She thought about calling the police. She thought about calling a lawyer. She thought about the baseball bat behind the counter at Sandy's and what it would feel like to swing it at Marco's smile.
None of it would work. The police didn't care about collection disputes on A1A. A lawyer cost money she'd need three good months to save. And the baseball bat was a fantasy that ended with her face hitting something harder than a Honda hood.
The whiskey burned going down. The kitchen was quiet. The ocean was a sound she couldn't hear from here, which meant she was too far from the only thing that had ever felt like home, and the men who wanted to take it from her had seventy-two hours of patience left.
Nina sat at her kitchen table with blood drying on her face and understood, with the cold clarity of a woman who'd been solving her own problems since she was fifteen years old, that this was not a problem she could outwork.