Epilogue
The nail went in crooked on the third hit because Alonzo told a joke and I laughed too hard to aim.
"Hold it straight this time," he called up from the ground. "You're the clan leader. Set an example."
"I'm setting an example of what happens when you run your mouth while I'm on a ladder.
" I yanked the nail out with the claw end and lined up a fresh one.
The morning sun had the valley lit up gold, the kind of light that made even a half-finished schoolhouse look like something worth building.
"Tell the punchline after I'm done with the framing. "
"The punchline is that you've been up there since six and you still haven't finished that wall."
"The punchline is that you're holding my water bottle and not handing it up."
He tossed it. I caught it one-handed and drank half of it in one go. The water had gone warm from sitting in the sun, but sawdust coated my throat and I'd stopped being picky about temperature around hour three.
Below me, the site hummed. Beni had the younger kids running lumber from the supply pile in relay lines that turned into a competition around mid-morning, because everything turned into a competition when you put teenagers and building materials in the same field.
Rafa worked the east wall, unhurried, setting joists at a pace that made the rest of us look like amateurs.
Two of the elders sat in the shade of the old oak, drinking coffee and supervising, which mostly meant arguing about whether the windows should face east or south.
My abuela would have loved this. She'd have been in that shade with her own coffee, telling everyone exactly where the windows should go, and she'd have been right.
I sank the nail clean this time, then three more. The frame had started to look like a building, and by next month the kids in this valley would have a proper one with a roof, desks, and a door that locked. I'd promised that when the families voted me in, and I intended to deliver.
From that same shade where the elders argued about windows, Alonzo scheduled relay routes across borders the EU pretended were open. Five centuries of survival ran on things that worked on two levels at once. A schoolhouse was just the latest version.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket. I cursed.
"Gotta go," I called down, already climbing. "Mila gets out in twenty."
"Take the south road," Alonzo said. "They're repaving the bridge on the main route."
I dropped the last few feet to the dirt, grabbed my shirt off the sawhorse where I'd tossed it an hour ago, and wiped the sawdust off my arms. The shirt was a lost cause, sweat-soaked and smeared with wood stain, but Mila had stopped noticing what I looked like at pickup around month two.
The truck started on the second try, which was better than yesterday.
The Reyes Appliance Repair logo on the door had faded from years of sun and mountain roads, but Mamá refused to let me repaint it.
Your father's name stays on. End of discussion.
So the truck rattled down the mountain with a dead man's name on its side, past appliance vans driven by Kalderash men hauling cargo that never appeared on any invoice.
My father had run the same game. The best cover was a real business doing real work.
The academy sat at the edge of town, tucked behind a stone wall covered in bougainvillea.
The building had been a monastery once, and every century since had left a mark on the stone without agreeing on a style.
Now it housed thirty kids, an arts program, and my daughter, who sat on the front steps with her backpack between her knees and a sketchbook open on her lap.
I pulled in. She moved her pencil in quick strokes, shading something I couldn't make out from the truck. I honked once. She held up one finger without raising her head.
I grinned and waited. A year ago, Mila would have been on her feet the second she clocked the engine sound. She would have scanned the vehicle, checked the exits, gone still until she confirmed it was me. Now she made me wait because she had a drawing to finish.
She closed the sketchbook, shoved it in her bag, and jogged to the truck. She climbed in, tossed the backpack on the floor, and buckled her seatbelt.
"Hey, carino. Good day?"
"Senora Vega says I have to stop drawing during math."
"She's probably right."
"My math is fine. I tested out of the next unit already." She pulled the sketchbook back out and flipped it open. "Look."
I glanced over while I turned the truck around.
She'd drawn the monastery courtyard, the one with the fountain and the orange trees.
She'd captured the way the afternoon light came through the archway, the shadows on the flagstones, even the crack in the fountain's basin that the school kept meaning to fix.
She was ten, and she drew like someone who'd spent a lifetime learning to see the world in terms of angles and sightlines and then turned that training into something beautiful.
"That's incredible, corazón."
"I want to do it in charcoal next. Can you get me the vine kind? Not compressed. Vine."
"Write it down for me, and I'll order it tonight."
She wrote it down. She wrote everything down now: lists and notes and labels on her drawings, filling notebooks the way other kids filled journals.
We drove home with the windows down and the warm air pushing through the cab.
The road wound up through olive groves and sheep pasture, past the old Reyes place.
Mila sketched in the passenger seat, bracing the book against her knee on the curves.
I drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the open window frame.
Home was a stone house at the top of the valley, set back from the road behind a low wall covered in climbing roses that Mamá had planted the week we moved in.
The tile roof had gone the color of dried clay, and the front door was heavy enough that Mila had to lean her whole weight into it for the first three months.
Every time I pulled into the gravel drive, it caught me in the chest.
We'd built this. Jasper and me. Diego's stupidly optimistic promise on a rooftop in Morocco turned into stone and mortar and a garden where Carmen Reyes grew peppers so hot they made grown men cry.
Mamá had designed the kitchen herself, dragging Jasper through tile showrooms and appliance stores until he'd started making spreadsheets to track her choices, which she loved because it proved he took it seriously.
Today the whole ground floor smelled like saffron and my stomach growled from the doorway.
"Mija!" Carmen turned from the stove, wiping her hands on her apron. She pulled Mila into a hug and kissed the top of her head. "How was school?"
"Good. I drew the courtyard. Where's Jasper?"
"In his cave." Mamá waved toward the back of the house. "Tell him dinner is in an hour, and if he misses it again, I'm feeding his portion to the dog."
"We don't have a dog," Mila said.
"I'll get one just to make the point."
Mila dropped her backpack by the door and disappeared down the hall. I stole an olive from the cutting board, and Mamá swatted my hand without looking.
"How's the school?" she asked.
"Framing's almost done. Another few weeks on the roof."
"You eat today?"
"Mamá."
"That's not an answer."
"Alonzo's wife brought empanadas at eleven."
She made a sound that indicated empanadas from Alonzo's wife did not meet her standards but would suffice in an emergency. I kissed her cheek and followed Mila down the hall.
Jasper's workshop was the second bedroom, buried under enough hardware to give a customs agent a stroke.
Every clan family in the valley fed data through this room: route schedules, border rotations, encrypted comms with the northern cells.
Jasper ran it all from a desk covered in gutted circuit boards and a mug of cold black coffee that qualified as a science experiment.
The man himself sat barefoot in his chair, wearing a t-shirt I was pretty sure belonged to me, reading glasses on, hair pulled back. He had a headset on and spoke rapid Russian to someone on the other end who sounded like they were having a worse day than we were.
Mila walked in, held up her sketchbook drawing, and waited.
Jasper glanced at it. He held up one finger to pause his call, pulled the headset to one side, and looked at the drawing properly.
"The shadows on the south wall are exact," he said. "You nailed the foreshortening on the archway."
Mila lit up for half a second and then schooled it back down, like she was still learning that it was safe to be pleased. "Senora Vega says I draw during math too much."
"Your math scores are perfect. Draw whenever you want." He put the headset back on. "Dinner?"
"An hour," Mila said. "Carmen says she's getting a dog to eat your food if you're late."
"Tell her I'll be there in thirty minutes ."
Mila left. I leaned against the doorframe.
"How's the empire?" I asked.
Jasper finished his call in Russian and pulled the headset off. "Andres found another routing vulnerability in the Bratislava exchange. Third one this month. The kid's a natural."
"You're turning our sheep farmers into hackers."
"I'm turning your sheep farmers into the best-funded, best-informed rural community in southern Europe." He spun his chair to face me. "There's a difference."
"Mhm. And the crypto mining?"
"Profitable." He pushed his glasses up. "Very profitable."
"And the thing I'm not supposed to ask about?"
"Still not supposed to ask about it."
I crossed the room and kissed him. He tasted like cold coffee and the cigarette he'd smoked on the back step an hour ago, and he leaned into me without calculating the angles first.
"Shower," he said against my mouth. "You smell like a construction site."
"You love it."
"I tolerate it. There's a difference."
"There really isn't."
He almost smiled. I caught it, the corner of his mouth, gone before it fully formed.