Chapter 7: Broken Reflections
The light in the observation room never changed. It was a flat, shadowless white that seemed to originate from everywhere at once, bleaching color from skin, from thought, from hope. Catalina sat in the hard plastic chair, not on the bed. The bed was for surrender. The chair was just for waiting.
She had been here for eighteen hours. The sitter outside the large interior window changed shifts three times. The man in the room with her, a bulky, quiet orderly named Ray, read car magazines and occasionally offered her water in a paper cup with a flexible plastic straw. She ignored him. Her attention was fixed on the mirror on the far wall. She knew it was one-way glass. Administration sometimes used it. But mostly, it was just there, reflecting the room back at her as a flat, depthless tableau. Her own reflection was a ghost superimposed over the mystery of who might be watching.
The door hissed open on well-oiled hinges. Mia stepped in, holding two styrofoam cups. She looked wrung out, her sweater rumpled, her eyes puffy. She gave Ray a tired smile. "Give us five?"
Ray glanced at Catalina, who hadn't moved. He marked his place in the magazine and stood. "Five minutes," he agreed, his voice a soft bass. He stepped out, closing the door with a gentle click.
Mia approached slowly, like one would approach a sleeping predator. She set one cup on the small table bolted to the floor. "It's tea.Mint. Hot."
Catalina's eyes didn't leave the mirror. Her hands rested in her lap, fingers tracing the edge of the white bandage on her left wrist. The gauze was crisp, sterile. It covered the healing cuts, but not the memory of the cold lake water, the peace she’d sought there, the violent interruption of her brother’s hands pulling her back into a world that hurt.
"Cat," Mia said softly, pulling the other chair over. The plastic legs scraped. "You need to talk to someone. The doctor.Me.Anyone. This silence... it’s eating you alive."
A long minute passed. The hum of the air vent was the only sound. Then, Catalina’s lips moved. The words were so quiet they were almost absorbed by the room before they reached Mia.
"He was fucking her against the Charger like it meant nothing."
Mia froze, the cup halfway to her lips. Her breath caught. She hadn’t seen it. She’d heard the commotion, seen Dom’s frantic run, put the pieces together later from Letty’s stony silence and Dom’s collapse outside this very window. But hearing the raw image from Catalina’s mouth was different. It was a violation, delivered in a hollow monotone.
"Cat..." Mia started, but the sound was incomplete.
"But it did mean something." Catalina continued, her fingers now picking at the edge of the bandage’s medical tape. Her gaze remained locked on her own ghost in the mirror. "It meant he could finally stop smelling me on his hands. After the lake. After he pulled me out. He carried me. His hands were on my skin for hours, even after I was in the hospital bed. He’d just stand there, holding my hand. I could smell me on him. My shampoo. The lake water. My sweat. It was driving him crazy."
Mia felt a cold knot form in her stomach. This wasn't grief. It was forensic analysis. Catalina was dissecting a crime scene where she was both victim and evidence.
"He needed to erase it," Catalina whispered. "So he used her. The strongest solvent he had. Letty. Engine grease and sweat and something that isn't me." A faint, terrible smile touched her lips, gone as quickly as it appeared. "He made sure I was watching. A front row seat to the cleansing. He yelled it up at me, Mia. He made sure I heard."
Mia remembered Dom’s vacant vigil in the waiting room chair, the terrifying intensity when he’d stopped Cat from taking the pills. This new picture, of a calculated, brutal performance in a parking garage, didn’t fit. Or maybe it did. Maybe both Doms were true. The protector and the poisoner, inextricably linked. "He was out of his mind, Cat.With worry. With guilt. He’s not… he doesn’t think."
"He thought enough to aim," Catalina said, her voice finally cracking. She tore her eyes from the mirror and looked at Mia. The emptiness was gone, replaced by a searing, wounded lucidity. "He thought enough to want to hurt me so badly I’d finally let him go."
Mia reached out, but Catalina flinched back. The rejection was physical, a small jerk of her shoulders. "He doesn't want you to let him go," Mia pleaded, her own tears threatening. "He was on the floor outside this room all night. He's shattered."
Catalina leaned forward then, the chair creaking. The distance between their faces shrank. Her eyes were deep pools of a pain so specific it felt contagious. The air grew still. Even the vent seemed to hold its breath.
"Tell me, hermana," Catalina breathed, the words barely audible, yet they seemed to echo in the sterile box of a room. "When you were down there. Before… before the pills. Did you hear it? Did you hear him?" She swallowed, a visible tremor in her throat. "Does he scream my name when she makes him come?"
Mia recoiled as if slapped. The question was a claw, digging into a place she’d refused to look. It was obscene. It was devastatingly honest. It reduced the complex, fucked-up tapestry of their bond to a single, brutal physical act. Mia’s hand flew to her mouth, her gasp trapped behind her fingers.
She hadn’t heard. She’d been asleep. But the question now lived in her head, unwanted, graphic.
Catalina saw the answer in Mia’s horror. She leaned back, the brief fire in her eyes guttering out, replaced by a weary, final acceptance. She looked at the bandage on her wrist again, then out the interior window. Across the hall, through the glass, Dom was a slumped shape on the floor, his head in his hands. He hadn’t moved in hours.
"Tell him something for me," Catalina said, her voice now flat and drained. She turned her gaze to the blank, white wall. "Tell him I finally let go."
The words had a terrible finality. Not of suicide, but of surrender. Of relinquishing a claim so fundamental it had defined the borders of her life. It was a quiet, internal severing.
"Cat, no, that's not—" Mia stammered.
"Five minutes are up," Ray said, opening the door. His presence was an intrusion of normalcy into the emotionally toxic atmosphere. He looked between the two sisters, sensing the charge, and settled back into his chair, picking up his magazine.
Mia stood, her legs unsteady. The styrofoam cup of tea was cold, untouched. She looked at Catalina, who had returned to staring at the one-way mirror, a statue once more. The words hung in the air: Tell him I finally let go.
Mia fled.
Out in the hall, she leaned against the cool wall, sucking in deep breaths of the antiseptic air. The image of Dom and Letty in the garage, the sound of Catalina’s whisper, the crushing weight of the message—it all spun in her head. She looked at Dom, a few yards down. He was a fortress under siege, crumbling from the inside.
She couldn’t give him Catalina’s message. Not like that. It would be a kill shot.
Instead, she walked over and slid down the wall to sit beside him. He didn’t acknowledge her. His knuckles were scraped raw; she realized he’d probably punched something in the garage stairwell after stopping Cat.
"She talked," Mia said quietly.
Dom’s head lifted. Red-rimmed eyes found hers, desperate for data. "What did she say?"
Mia wrestled with the truth. She edited. "She’s… processing. What she saw. It hurt her, Dom. In a way I don’t think you meant."
"I know what I meant," he said, his voice gravel. "I meant to burn it down. I didn’t know what else to do."
"Well, it worked," Mia snapped, the anger surprising her. "It’s all ash now. You, her, Letty. Congratulations."
He absorbed the blow without reaction. "She say anything else?"
Mia hesitated. The unvarnished message, the question about his screams, was a poison pill. But she had to give him something, a thread to pull. "She said to tell you something. But I’m not sure I should."
"Tell me."
"She said, 'Tell him I finally let go.'"
Dom went very, very still. The words didn't seem to land as a relief. They landed like a sentence. His face, already pale, lost its last vestige of blood. His eyes fixed on the window of the observation room. He seemed to be looking through it, through the wall, into some desolate future only he could see.
"She hasn’t," he said after a long minute, the words thick. "She’s just… relocated the fight."
"What does that mean?" Mia asked, frustration bubbling over.
"It means the war’s over," Dom said, pushing himself to his feet with a groan. His body protested, stiff from hours on the hard floor. "She just conceded the battlefield. Not to me. To the silence." He looked down at Mia, his expression haunted. "That’s worse, Mia. That’s so much worse than her trying to die. That’s her already being gone."
He walked away, not toward the elevators, but toward the stairwell. His gait was heavy, defeated.
Mia stayed on the floor, trying to
decipher the difference between surrendering a battlefield and being gone. She failed. The sterile hall offered no answers. Only Ray’s occasional page turn and the smell of lukewarm antiseptic scrub. Dom’s heavy footfalls faded behind the stairwell door’s pneumatic sigh, leaving a deeper silence.
She looked at the untouched tea, the closed observation door. Catalina’s whispered question, the one she hadn’t delivered, curdled in her stomach like something spoiled. It felt like a handoff she never asked for. Protecting Dom felt like betraying Cat. Telling him the truth felt like dropping a lit match into a fuel drum. Mia pushed herself up, her joints aching from the floor.She needed air. Not this canned, processed stuff. She headed for the same stairwell, its concrete well a cold echo chamber for every slammed door and frantic footstep of the last three days. She descended, not following Dom, just fleeing the clinical weight of the seventh floor.
---
Dom didn't go to the garage. The Charger held ghosts he couldn't face. Instead, he pushed out into the sharp morning air at the hospital's ambulance bay. The sun was a pale, watery eye struggling through leftover rain clouds. It did nothing to warm him. He leaned against the rough brick wall, feeling its chill seep through his thin t-shirt. He could still smell the phantom scent of Letty’s skin, the gasoline tang of the garage, the medicinal bleach of Cat’s room. They were a noxious cocktail he couldn't expel.
Finally letting go.
The words were worse than any vitriol she could have spat. They were an absolution he didn't want. A permission slip for a life he couldn't imagine. His entire existence had a single, locked center—the bond with his twin, a gravity so constant he’d mistaken it for ground. Now the ground said it was releasing him. It felt less like freedom and more like orbital decay, a slow, helpless spiral into cold, empty space.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. Mia.
He ignored it. A minute later, it buzzed again. Then a third time, insistent. He fished it out, expecting another plea, another worried update.
The screen showed three consecutive text bubbles.
Mia: She said more.
Mia: In the room. Before she told me to tell you she let go.
Mia: She asked me something. I didn’t tell you because it’s fucking cruel and she’s not in her right mind.
Dom’s thumb hovered. The pale morning light glared on the glass. He typed, his fingers clumsy and cold.What.
The three dots pulsed. Stopped. Pulsed again. It felt like an hour. The phone buzzed finally.
Mia: She asked me if you scream her name when Letty makes you come.
The world did not stop. It sharpened. Every color intensified—the gray of the asphalt, the yellow of a parked ambulance, the red of a dying leaf stuck in a drain grate. The ambient sounds of the hospital—a distant siren, an idling engine, a shouted order—funneled into a high-pitched whine in his ears.
He read the sentence three times. Four.
It was a perfect weapon. Because it reduced the oceanic, impossible complexity of what he felt for Catalina into a single, crude biological metric. It turned his brutal, cowardly fuck in the garage into a potential referendum on her. Had he? In that frenzy of self-loathing and animal need, seeking obliteration against Letty’s familiar shape, had her name been a ghost on his tongue? He honestly didn’t remember. The entire act was a black hole in his memory, defined only by its intent and its aftermath.
But the question itself was the point. By asking it, Catalina was telling him she was measuring her worth, her remaining claim on him, in that specific, humiliating currency. She was listening for an echo of herself in the sounds he made with someone else.
It was also a trap. Answering yes would be a confession of a depth he’d spent a lifetime trying to pave over. Answering no would be the final, dismissive proof of her erasure. There was no right answer. Only different shapes of hurt.
He felt a tremor start deep in his core, a vibration of pure, undiluted rage. Not at Cat. Not even at Mia for delivering it.At himself. For creating a world where this was the language they spoke. Where love was a contaminant you tried to scrub off with another woman’s body, and devotion was measured by what name you choked out during an act of betrayal.
A green sedan pulled into the bay. A nurse got out, juggling a coffee and a tote bag. She glanced at him, a large man trembling against a wall with a phone clutched in a white-knuckled fist, and quickly looked away, picking up her pace.
He needed to move. To do something. The stagnant helplessness was a physical sludge in his veins. He shoved off the wall and strode back inside, not up to the seventh floor, but down to the administrative offices he’d spent hours in days before, negotiating, threatening, pleading.
He found the patient coordinator, a woman named Lin with a perpetually harried expression, closing a file cabinet.
“Toretto,” she said, a wary recognition in her eyes. “I told you, visiting hours for your sister’s new room aren’t until—”
“I need to see her psychiatrist. Now.”
“Dr. Vance’s schedule is booked. You can make an appointment—”
Dom placed both hands flat on her desk, leaning forward. He didn’t raise his voice. The quiet in it was more dangerous. “Listen to me. My sister has been in your care for ninety-six hours. In that time, she was allowed to witness a deeply traumatic event from her window, which directly led to a serious suicide attempt using medication from your cart.Your security failed. Your observation failed. Now she’s catatonic and asking questions about sexual acts. I am not leaving this office until I speak to the person in charge of her treatment. Not tomorrow. Now.”
Lin held his gaze for a long moment, assessing the unyielding fury in his. She saw the ragged edges of a man with nothing left to lose. The hospital’s liability was a tangible thing in the air between them. She sighed, picked up her phone, and pressed an extension.“Dr. Vance? Dominic Toretto is in my office. He insists on speaking with you regarding today’s incident. He’s… quite adamant.” A pause. “Yes. I’ll send him up.”
---
Dr. Vance’s office smelled of old books and lemongrass. The doctor himself was in his fifties, with tired, intelligent eyes behind wire-framed glasses. He did not offer Dom a seat.“Mr. Toretto. Lin said there was an ‘incident’. I’ve reviewed the notes. The attempt last night was intercepted. She is stable.”
“Stable isn’t a state of mind,” Dom said, remaining standing. “It’s a medical term for ‘not currently dying’. She told my sister to tell me she’s ‘finally letting go’. Then she asked if I scream her name when I have sex with another woman. Does that sound stable to you?”
Vance’s expression flickered. The clinical detachment wavered for a second, replaced by a spark of professional intrigue, then concern. “The content is disturbed. The question indicates a profound fixation on her relationship with you, one she is measuring in sexually competitive terms. It’s a form of psychological self-harm.” He templed his fingers. “The ‘letting go’ statement could be a positive step toward accepting necessary boundaries. Or it could be a manifestation of suicidal ideation—a letting go of life itself. It’s ambiguous.”
“I don’t care about your ambiguity,” Dom said, his voice low. “I care about what happens next. You want to transfer her to a long-term facility. A cage with softer walls.”
“It’s the recommended level of care. She needs structured therapy, away from… environmental triggers.”
Dom finally moved, a single step closer to the desk. “I am her environment. I’m the trigger. I know that. Shipping her off won’t fix that. It’ll just make her believe she’s the problem that got shipped away.” He took a breath, the plan forming from sheer desperation as he spoke. “I’ll take her.”
Vance blinked. “That’s not an option. She’s a voluntary hold now, but given the events—”
“I’ll take her to a private facility. The best one you recommend. Anywhere. I’ll pay for it. She gets her own room, real therapy, no shared carts of pills. But there’s one condition.”
“Which is?”
“I stay nearby. Not in the room. Not even in the building if that’s the rule. But in the same town. So when she’s ready—to yell at me, to ask me another fucked-up question, to just see that I haven’t run—I’m there. Not a phone call away. There.”
Vance studied him. He was used to angry relatives, pleading relatives, guilty relatives. This was different. This was a man offering a ransom for a chance to stand vigil at a different gate. “Why?”
“Because she needs to know the silence isn’t winning,” Dom said, the truth of it settling into his bones. “I made the noise. I own it. She needs to know that when she’s tired of the quiet, I’m the one who’s gonna answer. Even if the answer is just my fucking face.”
A long silence stretched. Vance looked down at Catalina’s file, then out the window. He was weighing protocol against something else—a raw, human equation. “She would have to agree to it. Truly agree. Not just acquiesce.”
“Let me talk to her. Alone. Not in the observation room. Somewhere… neutral.”
“That is highly irregular.”
“So is everything about this,” Dom countered. “Your system failed. My… everything failed. We’re past regular. We’re in damage control. Give me fifteen minutes.”
Vance closed the file. He made a decision, one that would likely require a lengthy note in the chart later. “There’s a family consult room on the second floor.Sunroom. Plants. It’s… less institutional. I’ll have her brought down in thirty minutes. A nurse will be posted outside the door, which will remain open six inches. You have fifteen minutes, Mr. Toretto. Do not make me regret this.”
---
The sunroom was a lie. It was a room with two sad ficus trees and vinyl chairs, but it had a window looking out on a scrubby courtyard. The light was real. Catalina stood by the window when Dom entered, her back to him. She wore the same hospital sweats. Her hair was a dark, unbrushed cascade down her back. The nurse, a different woman, gave Dom a stern nod and pulled the door almost shut, leaving the mandated sliver of space.
Catalina didn’t turn. She watched a sparrow peck at nothing on the concrete.
He didn’t speak. He walked to the center of the room and stopped, waiting. The memory of her question to Mia hung between them, a rusted blade on the floor neither would pick up first.
Finally, her voice came, thin and used. "Mia told you the other thing, didn't she."
"Yes."
"It was a shitty thing to ask."Yes."
"I needed to know." The sparrow flew away."Why?"
She turned then, slowly. The morning light carved hollows under her cheekbones, made her eyes look bruised. "Because if you did, it meant you were lying to yourself down there. And if you were lying, maybe you still... belonged to me a little. In some secret, shameful way." A ghost of her old defiance touched her lips, bitter and faint. "If you didn't, it meant you'd already succeeded. You were clean. And I was truly just your crazy sister in a window."
The honesty was paralyzing. It laid her guts on the vinyl floor. "There's no clean," he said, the words gravel. "I used Letty like a towel. It wasn't about her. It was never about her."
"I know." She wrapped her arms around herself. "That's what makes it worse. You turned something that should be... human into a message. For me. You turned us into a conversation no one else can hear." She looked at the open sliver of door, at the nurse's shadow beyond. "I'm tired of this conversation, Dom. It only has one volume. And it's destroying everyone around us.Mia. Letty.Vince. The whole crew walks on glass."
He took a single step forward. She didn't retreat. "I told the doctor I'd take you to a private clinic. Anywhere.The best. You get real help. But I stay in the town. However long it takes."
Her eyebrows lifted, a flicker of surprise. "Your kingdom is the garage, the streets. Not some waiting room in Sedona or fucking Switzerland."
"My kingdom," he said, holding her gaze, "is wherever you are. That’s the problem. That’s always been the problem. But running from it almost got you killed. So we’re not running. We're… relocating the kingdom. To a place with doctors and rules and six-inch gaps in the doors. Where we can learn a new language. Or learn how to be quiet without it screaming."
A tremor went through her. The idea of him nearby but separate, of structured help, of an escape from this particular fluorescent hell, was a tangible temptation. The fatalism in her eyes warred with a deep, stubborn will to live. She looked at his hands, the scraped knuckles. At the sheer, dogged exhaustion on his face.
"You look like hell," she whispered.
"So do you."
A faint, almost imperceptible breath that might have been a laugh escaped her. It died instantly. "If I say yes… you don't get to visit unless I say. You don't get updates unless I allow it. You're just… there. A satellite. A ghost. You have to promise."
He nodded, a sharp jerk of his chin. "I promise."
"And Letty?"
"That’s my mess.Not yours. Never was."
She looked back out the window. The sparrow had returned. "Alright," she said, so softly he almost missed it. "Alright. Get me out of here."
Relief didn't flood him. It was a cooler, quieter thing: a ceasefire. A temporary map drawn over a warzone. It was all he could get.
He turned to go, to find Dr. Vance, to set the colossal, expensive wheels in motion. As he reached the door, her voice stopped him again.
"Dom."
He glanced back.
Her profile was to him, lit by the weak sun. "The answer," she said, not looking at him. "To the question I asked Mia. I don't want to know. Ever. Let it be the last piece of noise. Then we try the quiet."
He held the doorframe, the vinyl cool under his grip. He gave the only answer he could."Okay."
He stepped into the hall. The nurse gave him a curious look. He walked past her, his gait no longer just heavy with defeat, but with a terrible, fragile purpose. He had a kingdom to relocate. A silence to keep. His sister's war was entering a new phase, in a sterile room far from home, and his only duty now was to be its most patient, most distant soldier. The fight was over. The work was just beginning.
Downstairs, in the parking garage, a woman’s hand wiped a streak of yesterday's rain from the Charger's flank. Letty’s knuckles were also bruised. She’d punched her own toolbox when she got home last night. She looked at the spot on the trunk, then got in, started the engine, and drove out into the ambiguous morning light, leaving the smell of gasoline and regret hanging in the stale air behind her.