Chapter 2: The Phone Call
The phone’s vibration was a frantic insect on the bare nightstand. Dominic surfaced from a thin, dreamless sleep, his hand fumbling in the dark. The screen’s glow was a brutal shock to the room—a stark slash across the concrete floor, the empty coffee cup, the neatly made bed he avoided as long as possible every night.
He saw Letty’s name.
A cold wire of dread tightened around his lungs. Letty never called this late unless the world was coming apart.
“Yeah.” His voice was ground glass.
“Dom.” Letty’s tone was all business, but underneath it ran a current of pure tension. “You need to get down here. Now.”
He was already swinging his legs out of bed, the sheet tangling around his waist. “What happened? Is it Mina? Is—”
“It’s Cat. She’s on the back steps. She’s… she’s not okay.” A pause, heavy with everything Letty couldn’t say over the phone. “She won’t talk to me. She won’t move. She just keeps staring at your car.” Letty’s voice dropped, so low he barely caught it. “Dom, I think she’s done.”
Those two words detonated in the silent apartment. She’s done. Done pretending. Done carrying it. Done with him.
“I’m coming.”
He didn’t bother with shoes. He grabbed a shirt from the floor, yanked it on as he took the apartment’s exterior stairs two at a time. The metal treads clanged under his bare feet, a sharp, jarring rhythm that matched his heartbeat. The night air was cool, smelling of asphalt and exhaust, a stark contrast to the remembered scents of jasmine and grilled meat from hours before.
His Charger sat below, a dark hulk in the pool of a single security light. And there, on the low concrete step of the shop’s back entrance, was a shadow.
The shadow resolved into Catalina, hunched over on the cold step. She was still in the same grease-stained tank top from the party, arms wrapped tight around her knees. In the yellow security light, she looked carved from something brittle and old.
Dominic’s bare feet made no sound on the asphalt as he approached. He stopped a few feet away, the Charger’s broad hood between them like a silent referee. The air hummed with the residual heat of the engine and things left unsaid for years.
“Letty called.” His voice sounded too loud in the stillness.
She didn’t look up. “I told her not to.”
“Yeah, well.” He shifted his weight, feeling the grit of the lot under his feet. “Since when does Letty listen?”
A ghost of a smile might have touched Catalina’s mouth. It was hard to tell in the bad light. She just stared at the oil stain on the concrete between her feet. The silence stretched, thin and sharp as a wire.
“Mina okay?” he finally asked, because it was the safest question, the one that anchored them both.
“Sleeping.” Catalina’s voice was flat, drained. “She asked if you were coming to read her a story tomorrow.”
He closed his eyes for a second. The casual cruelty of a child’s love, a simple request that was a landmine. “I’ll be there.”
“Will you?” This time she looked up. Her eyes were hollow, all the fire from their earlier argument banked to cold ash. “Or will you just sit in your car outside the house again, watching the lights go out?”
He had no answer for that. He’d done it more times than he could count. She’d seen him.
“Cat…” He took a step closer, then stopped. “Talk to me.”
“What’s there to talk about, Dom?” She unfolded her legs, stretching them out as if they ached. “We just go in circles. You want to burn it down. I want to keep the lights on for her. We’re stuck.”
“We’re not stuck. We’re choosing this. Every damn day.” He ran a hand over his head, frustration bubbling up. “We chose the lie. We’re choosing to keep it.”
“And what’s the alternative?” She stood up suddenly, the movement jarring. “You tell me. You walk in there tomorrow, you grab Mia, you say ‘Hey, sis, funny story’?”
“Stop.”
“No. You wanted to talk. Let’s talk.” She took a step toward him, her face now fully in the light. The shadows under her eyes were deep bruises. “You want to be her father? Okay. What’s step one? Do we move in together? Get a little house in the valley? Do we tell her first, or do we let the family find out when the gossip hits the block?”
“You think I haven’t thought about it?” he shot back, his voice rising before he clenched his jaw, forcing it lower. “Every single scenario ends with them looking at us like we’re monsters. With Mia puking in the bathroom. With Mom not being able to say our names.”
“So we stay quiet.” Her words were final, a verdict. “We stay quiet, and we watch our daughter grow up calling you ‘tío.’ We watch her bring home some guy someday, and you get to play the protective uncle while I die a little inside, knowing I can’t ever tell her why she has your eyes.”
The image was a physical blow. He turned away from her, bracing his hands on the warm hood of the Charger. The metal was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting under his feet.
“I can’t do that anymore,” she said, quieter now. The fight had left her, replaced by a terrifying stillness. “I’m tired, Dom. I’m so tired I can’t even think straight.”
He heard the shuffle of her feet on the concrete, the soft sigh of denim. When he turned back, she was leaning against the shop’s roll-up door, her head back, staring at the hazy orange sky.
“Remember that first time?” she asked, her gaze fixed upward. “In the garage. After Dad’s funeral.”
He remembered. The grief had been a wild thing in both of them. The need for comfort had turned into something else, something desperate and bright and wrong. They’d promised each other it was a one-time thing, a fracture born from loss.
“Yeah,” he breathed. “I remember.”
“It wasn’t just once, though, was it?” She looked at him then, and the raw truth in her gaze was more frightening than any anger. “We kept finding reasons. Or we stopped needing reasons.”
Dominic pushed off the car, crossing the space between them in two strides. He didn’t touch her, but he stood close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin, to see the rapid pulse in her throat. The air crackled with the memory of every stolen touch, every hushed conversation in the dark.
“What are you saying, Cat?”
“I’m saying I can’t live in the in-between anymore.” A single tear escaped, tracking a clean line through the dust on her cheek. “It’s killing me. And it’s going to kill whatever’s left between us.”
His hand lifted of its own accord, his thumb catching the tear before it could fall. The contact was electric, a circuit completing after too long apart. She flinched but didn’t pull away.
“So what’s the move?” His voice was rough, barely a whisper. “You want me to leave? To get out of L.A.?”
She leaned into his touch, just for a second, a moth to a flame. Then she gently moved his hand away, holding it between both of hers. Her fingers were cold.
“I want you to choose,” she said, looking down at their joined hands. “Not out of guilt, not out of some… fucked-up sense of duty. I want you to look at me and tell me what you want. Not what’s right. Not what’s easy. What you want.”
He stared at their hands. His, scarred and oil-stained, held in hers. The answer was a roar in his blood, a truth so fundamental it was his bones, his breath. It was also the one thing he could never, ever say.
A screen door squeaked open and slammed shut up the block. They both froze, their hands snapping apart as if burned. The spell of the empty night was broken. The world, with its prying eyes and its crushing rules, was still there.
Catalina wrapped her arms around herself again, the moment of vulnerability gone, sealed away behind the familiar, weary mask. “I should get back. Mina might wake up.”
“Cat, wait.”
“No.” She shook her head, already stepping past him toward the alley that led back to the house. “Just… think about it, Dom. Really think about it.”
She disappeared into the shadow between the buildings, leaving him alone with the humming light and the ghost of her touch on his skin. He stood there for a long time, until the concrete grew cold under his feet and the first hint of gray touched the eastern sky.
The choice she’d given him wasn’t a choice at all. It was a verdict waiting to be delivered. He looked at his hands, the hands that could rebuild an engine from scrap, that could hold his daughter, that could trace his sister’s spine. They felt useless.
He turned and walked back up the metal stairs, each step echoing in the quiet. Back in his empty apartment, he didn’t go to bed. He went to the window, watching the light bleed into the sky over the rooftops. Downstairs, in the silent bay, sat the Charger. His sanctuary, his monument.
He knew what he wanted. It had never been a question. The real question, the one that stole the air from his lungs, was whether wanting it made him the villain of this story, or just a man doomed to love the wrong person in the only way he knew how. The sun rose, indifferent, casting the room in a pale, revealing light. It showed the dust on the floor, the emptiness of the bed, the half-finished coffee from a lifetime ago.
He had to choose. And he knew, with a sick, certain dread, that either choice would break something forever.
The gray light made everything look worn and pointless. He moved through the silent apartment, his reflection ghosting in the toaster, a man out of place in his own skin. The shower water was too hot, then too cold, failing to shock him awake from the numbness.
Downstairs in the garage, the familiar smell of oil and stale coffee was a hollow comfort. He ran a cloth over the Charger’s flawless paint, not to clean it, just to have something to do with his hands. The motion was a prayer without words. He was still there, polishing the same fender, when Letty’s ’72 Nova growled into the bay an hour later.
She killed the engine and just sat, watching him through the windshield. When she finally got out, her boots echoed on the concrete. She leaned against her car door, arms crossed.
“You look like hell.”
“Feel like it.” He didn’t look up from the wax.
“Did you sleep at all?”
“What’s it look like?”
She pushed off the door and walked over, snatching the cloth from his hand. “Stop. Just stop.” Her eyes scanned his face. “What did she say to you?”
“She’s done.” The words felt like spitting out glass. “She said she can’t do it anymore. The in-between.”
Letty absorbed this, her jaw tight. She’d been the keeper of this secret for so long, but even she looked shaken by the finality in his tone. “So what’s that mean, Dom? What’s ‘done’ look like?”
“I don’t know!” The outburst echoed off the metal shelves. He took a breath, lowering his voice. “She wants me to choose. To say what I want.”
“And what do you want?”
He stared at her, his eyes pleading for an answer she couldn’t give. “You know what I want.”
“Yeah. I do.” She tossed the cloth onto a workbench. “So say it. To her.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is.” She stepped closer, her voice low and fierce. “It’s the only thing that is. You love her. She loves you. That’s the simple, fucked-up, terrifying truth. Everything else is just… noise.”
“It’s not noise to Mia. It’s not noise to my mother.” He turned away, gripping the edge of the workbench. “It’s a bomb.”
“And the life you’re living now?” Letty gestured vaguely toward the house. “That’s a slow bleed. You’re both bleeding out. You think Mina doesn’t sense it? Kids aren’t stupid.”
Her use of Mina’s name, not ‘the kid’ or ‘her,’ was deliberate. It twisted the knife. He saw the monster in the engine block from Mina’s nightmare, a growling thing she couldn’t see but knew was there. Was he the monster?
“I could leave,” he said, the idea forming as ash in his mouth. “I could go up north, get work. Send money.”
“And become the ghost you already are?” Letty’s laugh was short and brutal. “That’s not a choice, Dom. That’s running. And she’d hate you for it. And so would I.”
The front bell of the shop jingled. A customer. The normal world intruding, demanding performance. Dom straightened up, the mechanic’s mask slipping into place. “We’re open.”
“Dom—”
“I’ve got work, Letty.” He walked toward the front, his back to her. “Thanks for… thanks.”
He spent the next few hours buried in the logistics of a brake job. The work was clean, methodical, a problem with a solution. He lost himself in the torque wrench and the smell of new pads. At noon, Mia swung by with two paper bags from the deli.
“Fuel stop,” she said, her smile easy as she placed a sandwich next to his elbow. “You missed breakfast.”
He wiped his hands, forcing a smile. “Got busy.”
“Mm-hmm.” She hopped up on a stool, unwrapping her own lunch. “Saw Cat this morning. She looked worse than you. Said Mina kept her up all night. Kid had a nightmare.”
Dom’s hand stilled. “Yeah?”
“Something about a monster in the car.” Mia took a bite, speaking around it. “Weird, right? Probably just all the talk about your race Friday. Gets her amped.”
“Probably.” He couldn’t taste his food.
“You should come by for dinner tonight,” Mia said, oblivious. “Normal people food. I’m making pasta.”
“I’ve got to finish this tune for Rey. Carburetor’s fighting me.”
“Bring it by the house. You can work in the driveway. It’ll be like old times.” She gave him a playful shove. “You’re hiding up here, Dom. It’s weird. We’re your family.”
The guilt was a live wire in his chest. He nodded, unable to speak.
After she left, the silence in the garage was oppressive. Her words echoed. Hiding. Family. Normal. He looked at the carburetor, a puzzle of metal and vacuum lines. This he could fix. This made sense.
His phone buzzed on the bench. A single text from Catalina.
> The part for the washing machine came. Can you install it tonight?
It was such a mundane, domestic request. It was also an olive branch, a thread back to her, to the house, to Mina. It was a test. He stared at the words, his thumb hovering over the screen.
He typed, deleted, typed again.
> Yeah. After dinner. I’ll bring my tools.
Her reply was almost immediate.
> Ok.
Just that. Ok. It felt like a cliff’s edge.
The afternoon bled away. He finished the brake job, delivered the car, took another call. He moved through the motions, but his mind was across town. He loaded his toolbox into the Charger as the sun began to dip, painting the sky in shades of fire and remorse.
Pulling up to the house felt like crossing a border. Lights were on inside. He could see Mia dancing by the kitchen window, something boiling on the stove. A normal scene. He sat in the idling car, watching the shadow of his own head on the steering wheel.
The front door opened. Catalina stood silhouetted against the warm light, a dish towel in her hands. She didn’t wave or smile. She just waited.
He killed the engine. The sudden silence was total. He grabbed his toolbox from the passenger seat, its weight a familiar anchor. When he approached, he could smell garlic and basil.
“Hey,” she said, her voice neutral.
“Hey. Brought the tools.”
“I see that.” She stepped aside to let him in. The house was warm, loud with Mia’s music from the kitchen. “It’s in the laundry room.”
He nodded, moving past her, careful not to brush against her in the narrow hallway. The distance between them was a physical space, charged and careful. Mina came tearing around the corner, her socks sliding on the floor.
“Tío! You’re here!”
She crashed into his legs, hugging him. He set the toolbox down and scooped her up, the simple, profound rightness of it almost buckling his knees. She smelled of crayons and grape jelly.
“Hey, mija. Heard you had a scary dream.”
Her face grew serious. “A monster. In the engine.” She tapped his chest. “In your engine.”
A chill, unrelated to the room’s temperature, went through him. He forced a smile. “My engine’s perfect. No monsters allowed.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” The lie tasted sour.
Mia popped her head out of the kitchen. “Food’s almost up! You fixing that washer now?”
“Yeah,” Dom said, setting Mina down. “Gotta earn my keep.”
He followed Catalina to the small, humid laundry room. The broken part sat on top of the machine. She closed the door behind them, muffling the sounds from the kitchen. The space was suddenly intimate, close.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, leaning against the dryer.
“You asked.” He opened his toolbox, focusing on selecting the right wrench. The metal was cool, solid.
She watched him, her arms folded. The silence stretched, filled with the hum of the fridge in the next room. “I’m scared,” she said, so quietly he almost didn’t hear it.
He stopped, the wrench heavy in his hand. He didn’t look at her. “Of what?”
“Of everything. Of this.” She gestured between them. “Of it ending. Of it never starting. Of Mina looking at me one day and knowing I’m a liar.”
He finally turned. Her face was pale in the fluorescent light. All the defiance from the night before was gone, stripped raw. This was just Cat, his Cat, terrified.
“You’re not a liar,” he said, the words feeling inadequate.
“What do you call this, Dom? What do you call us standing here, in my house, with our daughter in the next room, and me feeling like I’m going to jump out of my skin because I want to touch you?” Her voice cracked on the last word. “That’s a lie. A big, living one.”
He took a step toward her, then stopped. The door was thin. Mia was right there. Mina was right there.
“I want you to touch me,” he said, the admission leaving him breathless. “I wake up thinking about it. I go to sleep thinking about it. It’s the only thing I know for sure.”
A tear escaped her eye. She didn’t wipe it away. “So choose.”
He looked at the wrench in his hand, a tool for fixing things. He set it down on the washing machine with a soft, definitive click. He looked at her, at the tear tracking through the dust on her cheek from the garage, at the fear and the hope warring in her eyes.
“I choose you,” he whispered. “I choose Mina. I choose us. However it has to look.”
It wasn’t a plan. It was a surrender. A direction.
Catalina’s breath hitched. She searched his face, looking for the doubt, the hesitation. She found none. For the first time in years, he was giving her the unguarded, terrifying truth.
Before she could respond, the doorknob rattled. They sprang apart. Dom grabbed the wrench, pretending to examine the back of the washer. Catalina swiped at her cheek.
The door opened. Mia stood there, a wooden spoon in hand. “You guys need a hand?”
“No,” Catalina said, her voice miraculously steady. “Dom’s almost got it.”
Mia’s eyes flicked between them, a subtle, curious look Dom didn’t like. “Okay. Well, food’s ready.” She lingered a second too long before pulling the door shut.
The moment was broken, but the words hung in the humid air between them. A line had been crossed. A decision, however fraught, had been made.
He finished installing the part in a focused silence, his hands steady. When he was done, he closed the toolbox with a final snap. Catalina was still leaning against the dryer, watching him.
“What now?” she asked.
“Now,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag, “we go eat Mia’s pasta. We act normal.”
“And after?”
He met her gaze, and for the first time, he didn’t see an end in her eyes. He saw a beginning, treacherous and dark and theirs. “After,” he said, “we figure it out. Together.”
He opened the laundry room door, letting the noise and light of the family dinner spill in. He followed her out, the ghost of his promise a new weight in his chest. It wasn’t a solution. It was a fuse, lit. He took his seat at the table, across from his daughter, next to his sister, and prepared to watch it burn.