Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
The café’s shade offered a brief reprieve from the heat, but now the sun was back in full force, weighing down on Lucía’s back as she stepped outside. She let the screen door click shut behind her and moved toward the edge of the lot where a sliver of shade was cast by a dying jacaranda tree.
Ryan was still inside, paying the bill. She sat down on her pack and closed her eyes.
They had a plan now. A lead. A city. It felt like something tangible, a thread they could pull, one that might—just might—have Noah on the other end.
But that feeling came wrapped in a strange kind of stillness.
Almost a hush. Like the lull before a storm breaks.
She opened her eyes and scanned the road, the lot, the tree line. A breeze kicked dust across the asphalt. No one lingered or stared.
And yet. There it was again. That feeling.
Not danger, not exactly.
Attention.
It wasn’t a threat you could see, it was one you could feel. A presence that knew too much about you. Knew your tells. Your silences. The things you never said.
Javier.
She breathed in through her nose, slow and controlled, forcing her pulse rate down to something she could control. This wasn’t a new fear. It was a remembered one.
The café door swung open. Ryan stepped out, adjusting the strap of his duffel. He looked at her for a second, just long enough to read the way she wasn’t moving. “You good?”
Lucía gave a short nod. “Just the heat.”
He squinted at her. “You were staring at nothing.”
“I was thinking,” she said. “That’s allowed, isn’t it?”
Ryan didn’t answer right away. Just shifted his weight and handed her a bottle of water. “Drink something. We’ve got about a mile to that hostel, and no one’s offering rides.”
Lucía took the bottle but didn’t twist the cap. “We’ll be fine.”
“Didn’t say we wouldn’t be,” he muttered, stepping off the curb. The sun caught the line of sweat darkening his collar.
She followed, keeping pace beside him, her fingers clenched too tightly around the bottle.
He didn’t ask again. But she could feel his eyes flick toward her every few steps, like he was trying to read something in her body language.
Lucía kept her gaze forward, but her thoughts stayed behind.
In the dust. In the shadow. In the shape of a man she hadn’t seen in years, but who never really left.