18 - Adrian #2
I drink, hard and fast, like I can burn the story down to ashes. “Zoila got taken by social services. I wasn’t eighteen, couldn’t get custody. Too young, no real income. The system swallowed her whole. She’s twenty-six now. Somewhere out there. I’ve spent half my life looking for her.”
I can’t look at Isa, but I can feel her—warm, unmoving, like a monument.
“That’s why I can’t leave Miami. Even when it’s burning down around me.
It’s the only place Zoila ever knew to find me.
If she ever comes back, it’ll be here. Maybe one day she'll remember her brother who failed her and come home anyway. "
The confession empties me out. I've never told anyone the full truth about my siblings. About Efrén and Zoila specifically. How losing them shaped everything I became. The watcher who refuses to lose sight of anyone. The man who'd cage what he loves rather than risk it disappearing.
I wait for Isa to break the tension, to crack a joke or pick a fight, anything to cut the open wound in the room. But she just sits with it, with me.
I go on, because now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. “I used to imagine her showing up at my door, pissed off, wanting old family recipes or to punch me in the mouth. Anything. I used to dream she’d bring Efrén with her, somehow.”
Isa’s hand finds the bottle, thumb circling the label. “You ever find her?”
I shake my head. “I hired people. Looked through every database I could get into. Half the time, I think I see her in crowds. It’s never her.”
The room feels too small for the grief in it. I realize my hands are shaking, so I press my knuckles into the floor until they stop. “You ever wish you could just…start over?” I ask her.
She stares at the wall, expression unreadable. “Every day,” she says. Her voice is even, no emotion, but I see the muscle in her jaw flex.
I nod, and something like relief passes through me. She gets it. Maybe she’s the only one who could.
I finally dare to look at her. She’s watching me, eyes dark, not pitying but something deeper. Understanding, maybe. Or forgiveness.
“You could leave,” she says, voice a little hoarse. “You could come with me to Lisbon. Or somewhere else.”
I let the words land. She means it. She’d take me with her, even knowing what I am. But I can’t. Not when there’s still a chance Zoila is looking for me.
“If I left, I’d lose her forever,” I say.
Isa just nods.
We lapse into silence again. The city outside is alive—sirens, reggaeton, the pulse of Miami’s night.
But inside, it’s just us and the whiskey.
I try to focus on the sharp taste, the heat of it, but my mind drifts back to my sister’s face, the way I remember it, as if she might walk in any minute and demand toast with too much butter.
Even as I give Isa everything about my siblings, part of me registers what I'm not saying. The quarry. Meiling. The real first time I saw her. That truth stays locked away, the one secret about our shared past that would destroy everything we're building.
Isa sets down her glass and shuffles closer. No words. She's never been a woman of comforting speeches. Instead, she wraps her arms around me and holds on. Just that. A simple embrace that breaks something open in my chest.
She smells like my shampoo and her own skin. Isa, who keeps everyone at arm's length, who treats human contact like a threat assessment, is holding me. Her cheek presses against my shoulder, her arms tight around me, and it's the closest thing to absolution I've ever felt.
We stay like that, quiet, while the last of the sunset fades outside. When she finally pulls back, there's something different in her eyes. Recognition, maybe. One damaged soul seeing another clearly.
I grab her hand before she can withdraw completely, and the tattoo of the key on her wrist catches the shadows. I run a thumb over the image, feeling the softness of her skin.
"The key," she says suddenly, looking down at the tattoo on her wrist. "You asked about it once."
I wait, not pushing. She's never volunteered this story, and I’ve never been able to figure it out. Why a key? What does it mean?”
"My old childhood friend, Meiling, had this diary.
One of those cheap locked ones kids get, with the tiny key and the terrible lock that anyone could break.
" Her voice goes soft with memory. "We kept our future in it.
Everything we were going to do when we got out, when we grew up.
Taiwan, Paris, all the places we'd go. The people we'd become. "
She touches the chain at her throat. "She wore the key on this chain. Said it was the key to the future." A sad smile crosses her face. "It was our stupid kid joke. The key to the future, like tomorrow was a room we could unlock."
My chest tightens. I knew the tattoo connected to Meiling, knew the chain mattered. But this story, this sweet origin, is genuinely new. Even to the man who knows everything about her.
"After she died, I kept the chain. Got the key tattooed." She traces the ink on her wrist. "The key to a future that never opened. All those plans we made, those people we were going to become. Gone."
She's handing me her grief, the same way I just handed her mine.
The diary, the future list, the cruel joke of a tomorrow that never came.
Beneath my tenderness, guilt hums like a struck wire.
She's telling me the warm beginning of a memorial to someone I watched die.
But I hold that knowledge down, locked away with all the other things that would destroy us.
"Thank you," I say, meaning it absolutely. "For telling me."
She leans into me again, our bodies finding that perfect fit.
For the first time since Efrén died, I let myself believe in tomorrow.
Not the desperate fantasy I've been feeding myself, but real possibility.
A future where Isa's key finally opens something.
Where my lighthouse watching actually leads somewhere.
The optimism that blooms in my chest feels dangerous, fragile as spun glass. But I let myself feel it anyway. Let myself believe that after everything, the stalking, the holes in the wall, the obsession, we might actually build something real.
The phone rings.
The sound shatters our perfect bubble like a rock through glass. That ringtone. Logan only calls from that number for emergencies. Blood-on-the-floor emergencies. We both freeze, still tangled together on the floor, whiskey warm in our veins and confessions hanging in the air.
And I've spent two days letting his ordinary calls die on the nightstand, which means he's stopped trying the ordinary ones.
I don't move to answer it. Can't. Won't. Not when I finally have everything I've ever wanted sitting right here beside me.
It rings again, insistent.
"You should get that," Isa says, but she doesn't pull away either.
"No." I tighten my arms around her, childish but unable to stop myself. "Whatever it is can wait."
The phone continues its assault on our bubble. Three rings. Four. On the fifth, it stops. The silence feels ominous, like the pause before thunder.
Then it starts again immediately.
"Adrian." Isa's voice carries a warning now. "Someone needs you."
Someone always fucking needs me. But right now, in this perfect moment, with her warmth against me and our deepest truths finally spoken, I want to pretend the outside world doesn't exist. That threats and territories and all the violence waiting outside can't touch us here.
The phone keeps ringing. I can feel our bubble straining, ready to shatter, the real world demanding entry with each insistent ring.
I hesitate, my hand halfway to the phone, not wanting to let this moment end. Not wanting to let whatever waits on the other side of that call intrude on the one perfect day we've managed to steal.