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Chapter 1. Fluorescent Lights and a Flinching Shoulder

The cubicle walls were beige fabric stretched over particleboard, the same beige as everything else in Graham County Community Health, and the fluorescent light above my desk hummed at a frequency that lived somewhere behind my left eye. I pressed my thumb into the space between my brows and stared at the Medicaid application on my screen—Mrs. Hernandez, seventy-three, diabetes, living alone on Social Security, applying for the third time because the first two had been lost in what the state called “processing delays” and what I called a quiet cruelty.

I asked myself: Did I eat enough today? A granola bar at nine, half a sandwich at noon. Probably not. Should I have said something different to the client this morning? The one who cried in the intake lobby because her husband’s cancer treatment wasn’t covered. I had offered her tissues and the number for a sliding-scale clinic. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

The phone headset left a red mark on my ear. I could feel it, a warm ridge of compressed skin. Delia’s voice crackled through from the front desk—she was explaining the same paperwork for the third time to someone who kept interrupting her. “Ma’am, I need the utility bill. Not a photo of the bill. The actual bill.” A pause. Then, sharper: “No, ma’am, I cannot accept a screenshot.”

I flinched and pulled my shoulders up toward my ears. The stranger in the lobby—I couldn’t see her, only hear her—said something about how this was ridiculous, how she had been waiting for hours, how nobody around here knew how to do their jobs. Delia’s voice went flat in that way it did when she was done being polite. The call ended with a crack of the receiver.

I tucked my hair behind my ear. The short bob fell forward again immediately. I tucked it again.

My mouse pad was worn to a shine where my palm rested. I traced the edge of it with my thumbnail—a nervous habit, something to do with my hands while I waited for my heartbeat to slow. The space heater under my desk blew warm air against my calves. The vent above blew cold. I lived in that contradiction every day, too hot and too cold at the same time, like my body couldn’t decide what to feel.

The afternoon stretched on. Mrs. Hernandez’s application sat incomplete because I needed a signature from a doctor who hadn’t returned my last three calls. I moved to the next file, and the next, each one a small story of someone who had fallen through a crack and couldn’t find their way back up. That was the job: catching people mid-fall, or trying to, my hands always just a little too slow.

By the time I shut down my computer, the light through the lobby windows had gone from grey to darker grey. The parking lot was half-empty. I shrugged into my faded black hoodie—the one with the saguaro print, soft from a hundred washes—and slung my canvas backpack over one shoulder. The air outside smelled of dust and the faint sweetness of the pecan orchards, carried on a wind that had crossed twenty miles of desert to reach me.

At home, the Cactus Rose Complex was quiet. My apartment smelled of the jasmine candle on the spool table, half-burned, its wick uneven. I kicked off my hiking boots by the door and was reaching for the kettle when my phone buzzed.

Maya: Puzzle almost done. Missing one piece. I think Caleb hid it.

A photo followed: a thousand-piece image of the Pinaleños at sunset, nearly complete except for a single gap near the peak.

I smiled. My thumbs moved across the screen. Check under the couch. He did that last time with the border pieces.

Before I could set the phone down, it buzzed again. A voice memo from Caleb. I pressed play and held it to my ear as I filled the kettle at the sink.

“—and I’m telling you, it’s the fuel injector, but the diagnostic says the pressure’s fine, so either the machine is lying or I’m losing my mind.” A laugh, too loud, the kind that covered something else. “Anyway. You eat today? Maya said you sounded tired. Bring your car by this week, I’ll check the alignment. It’s pulling again, I can hear it in your voice memo from Tuesday. Don’t argue with me.”

The kettle clicked off. I poured water over a chamomile teabag—the mug was chipped, my favorite, the one with a hairline crack that didn’t leak—and sat on the couch with the crocheted blanket pulled over my legs. The television was off. The vertical blinds clicked against each other as the AC kicked on.

I texted Maya back: Tell Caleb I ate. And my car is fine. And I love you both.

Maya’s response came in three parts, which was how she did everything—slowly, carefully, like she was checking each word before she released it:

Are you sure you’re okay?

You can tell us if you’re not.

We’re here.

That was Maya’s trauma surfacing: the way she asked the same question three different ways because she had learned, years ago, that people lied when you asked once. Her father had been deported when she was eight. She had spent years passing as white, changing her name from Mayra to Maya, bleaching her hair, pretending. Now she couldn’t take anyone’s first answer.

And Caleb—the too-loud laugh, the way he wiped his hands on his jeans even when there was no grease, the constant motion of fixing things because fixing was how he avoided the silence. His trauma was the golden child trap: the one who was supposed to get out, make something of himself, and then came back to Safford to open an auto shop, and his father looked at him like he had failed.

We were all carrying something. That was why we worked.

I typed back: I’m okay. Just tired. Work was work. Love you.

Then I opened my journal—the leather-bound one with the cracked spine—and wrote nothing. Just held the pen over the page, watching the ink dry on the tip. I wanted to write I think I’m lonely but that wasn’t true. I had Maya. I had Caleb. I had Teófilo.

Teófilo.

Seven years of friendship. Seven years of sitting in folding chairs in his grandmother’s garage, drinking café de olla, watching the light change on the Pinaleños through the open roll-up door. Seven years of telling myself that the flutter in my chest when he smiled was just friendship. Just warmth. Just the relief of being seen by someone who didn’t expect you to be anything other than what you were.

I closed the journal.

Four days later, I drove to his grandmother’s house on 12th Street because he had asked for a favor—a work-related thing, some paperwork he needed help translating from a client who spoke only Spanish and whose family was too overwhelmed to advocate for themselves. That was Teófilo: always helping someone, always the family liaison at the school district, always the one who translated and advocated and attended meetings until he had nothing left for himself.

The garage door was open when I arrived. I parked on the street and walked up the concrete path, past the blue house with the Virgin of Guadalupe poster in the window, past the cottonwood tree dropping leaves on the roof. The garage smelled of gasoline and dust and something sweet—tamales in the mini fridge, probably, left by his grandmother.

He was standing at the red tool chest, his back to me, wearing a fitted white t-shirt and his simple gold chain. The chain caught the light from the string of bare bulbs overhead, flickering gold against his tanned neck.

“Adina.”

He turned when he said my name, and his voice was warm, relaxed, like he had been expecting me and was glad I had come. His dark brown eyes found mine. His hair was messy, windswept, the way it always was no matter how many times he combed it.

My chest tightened.

I recognized the feeling immediately—that pull, that warmth spreading from my sternum to my fingertips. I had felt it before, years ago, with someone else, and it had ended the way those things always ended: with a slow fade, weeks of unanswered texts, the terrible realization that I had been someone’s maybe instead of someone’s choice.

The flashback came without warning.

“I’m just busy,” he said. Three weeks of busy. Then four. Then the read receipts stopped. Then the silence became permanent.

I tucked my hair behind my ear.

“Hey,” I said. One syllable. Flat. Safe.

Teófilo tilted his head, studying me. The gold chain shifted against his collarbone.

“You okay?” he asked. “You look—”

“Fine.” I pulled my backpack higher on my shoulder. “Just tired. Work was work.”

He didn’t push. That was the thing about Teófilo—he noticed everything, but he never pushed. He let you come to him. He let you decide when to speak.

I sat in one of the folding chairs—the faded green one with the duct-taped seat—and pulled out the paperwork. He sat across from me, close enough that I could smell his laundry detergent, something clean and soft, and underneath it the faint sandalwood of the diffuser in his condo.

“This is the client,” he said, handing me a file. “The mother speaks mostly Spanish. The father works at the mine, double shifts, never home. The school is threatening to hold the kid back because of attendance, but the attendance issues are because the kid has asthma and no one’s been able to get him to a specialist.”

I nodded. “I can make some calls.”

“I knew you would.”

His knee brushed mine under the cheap folding table. I forgot to breathe for a full second.

He’ll leave, I told myself. They always do.

But I stayed in the chair. I helped him with the paperwork. I made the calls on my phone while he watched me with an expression I couldn’t read—something soft, something searching.

And when I drove home that night, the knot in my chest was tighter than it had been in years.

Hope, I thought, felt like a wound reopening.