Chapter 9: The Bridge
The flickering neon buzzed like a trapped insect overhead, casting a sickly green pulse across the oil-stained asphalt between them. Letty’s pity was a physical thing in the damp air, and Jacob wanted to punch straight through it.
“They don’t need my help,” he repeated, his voice dangerously quiet. “They need me to not make it worse. That’s what you’re saying? I should just look the other way?”
“I’m saying you don’t know shit.” Letty reached into the chest pocket of her coveralls and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Her hands weren’t quite steady as she tapped one out. “You think this was some choice they made? Like picking a flavor of ice cream? You think they woke up one day and decided to ruin everything?”
“They made decisions.” Jacob watched her cup her hands around the lighter’s flame. The flare illuminated the hard lines of her face. “Every day. They decided to lie. They decided to keep going.”
Letty took a deep drag, the ember flaring orange. She exhaled a stream of smoke that the halogen lights cut through. “Yeah. They decided to keep breathing. You ever think maybe that was the biggest decision they had?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She looked past him, her eyes focused on some distant point only she could see. “Last winter. Rain so cold it felt like needles. Catalina called me at three in the morning. Her voice was… flat. Said she’d left Mina with Dom, she needed air. I knew.”
Jacob said nothing. The thrum of a distant freeway filled the silence.
“I found her car parked at the south end of the Coronado Bridge.” Letty’s words came out with the smoke, thin and bitter. “She was just standing there at the railing, in this little cotton dress, soaked through. Hair plastered to her face. She wasn’t crying. Just staring at the black water.”
A cold knot tightened in Jacob’s gut. He could see it. The dark steel, the dizzying drop, his little sister’s small frame silhouetted against the city glow.
“Dom was already there.” Letty’s voice dropped. “I don’t know how he knew, but he was. He wasn’t grabbing her, wasn’t shouting. He was just behind her, his arms locked around her waist, his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades. They were both shaking. And she was talking, real quiet. I only caught it when I got close.”
Letty took another drag, her eyes glistening. “She said, ‘Our daughter deserves better than monsters.’ Said it over and over, like a prayer. And Dom… he just held on. He whispered back, ‘Then we get better. We just gotta get better.’”
The image was too sharp, too intimate. Jacob looked away, his gaze catching on the warped reflection of the neon Toretto sign in an oil-slick puddle. A name drowning in muck.
“He dragged her back from that rail,” Letty said, grinding the half-smoked cigarette under her boot. “Not literally. He just held on until her legs gave out. They sat there on the wet walkway for an hour, him rocking her, both of them crying. I waited in my car with the heater blasting until he carried her to it.” She finally looked back at Jacob. “So you tell me, Mr. Fix-It. What was the ‘sensible’ move that day? Calling your mom? Calling you? Would that have helped?”
Jacob’s jaw ached from clenching. The cold, logistical part of his brain tried to formulate an answer. Therapy. Intervention. Something. But the picture of them on that bridge, hollowed out by a love that had nowhere to go, stole all his clean solutions.
“They’re sick,” he said, but the words had no force behind them.
“They’re in pain,” Letty corrected, her voice frayed. “There’s a difference. You wanna help? Actually help? Then be the brother who makes sure they never feel that cornered again. Not the one who pushes them toward it.”
“You’re asking me to approve of this.”
“I’m asking you to see them!” Her shout bounced off the metal shop doors. “Really see them. Not the idea you have of them. Them. Your brother. Your sister. Two people who have been fighting a war inside their own heads since they were kids, and the only crime they committed was finding the one person who understood the battlefield.”
Jacob leaned back against the cold fender of the car, the metal seeping cold through his shirt. The anger was still there, a hot coal in his chest, but it was smothered under a heavy ash of confusion. He’d come here for a target, for a clear enemy in the form of his siblings’ deceit. Letty was giving him a tragedy instead.
“Where are they now?” he asked, his voice drained.
“I don’t know. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Not while you look like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re gonna build a cage for them with your own two hands.” She turned, picked up her sander again, the conversation clearly over in her mind. “Go home, Jacob. Talk to your mom. Be there for Mia. That’s your job right now. Let them… just let them breathe for a minute.”
He pushed off the car. The urge to do something, to fix, to act, itched under his skin with nowhere to go. He looked at the locked shop, his father’s name fading on the sign. A legacy built on straight lines and clear rules. None of which applied here.
Without another word, he walked back to his truck. The engine roared to life, a sound of pure frustration. He didn’t drive home.
He drove aimlessly, the streets a blur of familiar landmarks that now felt like a stage set. The park where they’d all played as kids. The school Dom and Cat had attended together. The taco stand their dad had loved. Every corner was stained with a memory he now had to re-examine, looking for the cracks he’d missed.
His phone buzzed on the passenger seat. A text from his mother: Are you with them?
He didn’t reply.
He found himself parked outside Catalina’s house. Her car wasn’t in the drive. The little porch light was on, a lonely beacon. Mina’s rainbow tricycle lay on its side in the front yard.
The weight of it all settled on him, heavy and final. Letty’s words painted a picture he couldn’t unsee. The bridge. The whispering. The sheer, bottomless despair of it. His plan—to find them, to dictate terms, to force them into a clean, distant exile—felt childish. A boy playing with blocks, trying to build a wall against a flood.
He rested his forehead on the steering wheel. The vinyl was cool and cracked.
He thought of Mia’s shattered face, her wish for a cleaner grief. He thought of his mother scrubbing a stain that wouldn’t come out. He thought of Dom’s arms locked around Catalina on the cold, windy bridge, holding the entire world at bay.
Monsters, she’d said.
Maybe they were. Maybe love just made monsters sometimes, ones that didn’t look like the storybooks.
He lifted his head. The empty house watched him back. He put the truck in drive and pulled away, the tires crackling over gravel. He had no destination. No plan. Just the humming silence of a problem he couldn’t engineer his way out of, and the terrible, dawning understanding that his brother and sister had been living in a different reality altogether, one where the floor was always a hundred feet above black water, and his judgement was just another push toward the edge.
He drove without thinking, the city’s grid dissolving into a smear of streetlights and swallowed by the deeper dark of the canyon roads. The engine’s growl was the only sound he trusted. He pushed it harder, taking the curves fast enough to make the tires protest, as if speed could outrun the image Letty had burned into his brain.
The bridge. The dress. The whispering.
It wouldn’t leave him. He found himself on the old route, the one their dad used to call “the aspirin run” for how it cleared your head. The night air, cooler up here, whipped through the open window. It carried the scent of dry sage and diesel.
He slowed, pulling onto a familiar gravel overlook. The city glittered below, a flat, ordered constellation of human problems. His hands stayed clenched on the wheel. His phone buzzed again, a persistent vibration against the vinyl seat. He ignored it.
“Monsters,” he said aloud to the empty cab. The word felt wrong in his mouth, a cheap label for something he was only now starting to feel the shape of. His anger hadn’t left, but it had rearranged itself, mixing with something colder and more frightening: a sense of scale.
This wasn’t a secret. It was a whole hidden country. A five-year history with its own borders, its own rules, its own near-collapses. He’d been living next door, oblivious.
The passenger window was down. A moth, dusty and frantic, beat itself against the interior dome light before escaping back into the night. He watched it go. His own flight instinct was a dull thrum in his veins.
He picked up the phone finally. Three missed calls from his mother. One text from a number he didn’t recognize. He opened it.
The message contained no words. Just a single image, grainy from low light. It was a photo of a kitchen counter—not their mother’s. A cheap laminate surface. On it sat two untouched mugs of coffee and, in the blurry foreground, two hands lying close together on the countertop, fingertips nearly touching.
Dom’s blunt, grease-stained fingers. Catalina’s smaller, nervous ones. The image was so intimate it felt violent. A shard of their secret world, sent to him without explanation.
He stared at it, his breath fogging the screen slightly. Who sent this? Letty? Catalina herself? It felt like a message in a code he couldn’t crack. A provocation. A plea. He had no idea.
A new text bubble appeared under the image from the same unknown number. It was just an address. Somewhere in Riverside, a warehouse district. Followed by two words: He’s here.
Jacob’s pulse kicked. It was a trap. It was a lifeline. His thumb hovered over the screen, the city’s distant glow reflecting in the glass. This was the move. Someone was making it for him.
He ran a hand over his face, the stubble scratching his palm. The practical part of his mind, the shop manager, catalogued the risks. The unknown sender. The isolated location. What he might walk into.
The other part, the brother, saw those two hands on the counter. He saw the space between the fingertips, a gap so small it was almost a touch. He heard Catalina’s flat voice on a phone in the dead of winter.
He started the truck.
The drive was a monotony of exit signs and industrial parks bleaching under orange sodium lights. The address led him to a long, low building beside the railroad tracks. A derelict auto-body shop, its sign long gone. One bay door was slightly ajar, a slice of weak yellow light spilling onto the cracked asphalt.
He killed the engine and sat listening. Crickets. The hum of a distant transformer. The scuttle of something in the weeds. No voices. No sound of tools.
He got out, the door’s creak obscenely loud. He approached the light, his boots crunching on gravel. He didn’t call out. Peering through the gap, he saw the back half of Dom’s black Charger, its familiar contours unmistakable. The car was up on jack stands, its rear axle exposed, a transmission case sitting on a tarp beside it.
“Figured you’d come.”
The voice came from the deep shadows to his left. Jacob startled, turning. Dom stepped into the faint light. He was wiping his hands on a red rag, his face a mask of weary caution.
The rag in Dom’s hands was stained the dark brown of old transmission fluid. “That was quick,” he said, his voice a low rumble that didn’t carry past the bay door.
“Someone texted me.” Jacob stayed by the entrance, the night air cool on his back. “A picture. This address.”
Dom gave a slow, unsurprised nod. He tossed the rag onto a workbench cluttered with socket wrenches. “Letty.”
“Why?” Jacob took a step inside. The air was thick with the smells of metal, gasoline, and something sour beneath it, like old coffee and sweat. “So I could find you changing your gearbox in the middle of nowhere? That’s the big reveal?”
“I needed the quiet.” Dom moved to the car, resting a palm on its rear fender. The metal echoed faintly. “My head’s been… loud.”
“Imagine that.” Jacob’s words were sharp, but his brother’s posture stopped him. Dom looked slumped, the usual defiant set of his shoulders gone soft.
Dom didn’t rise to the jab. He just stared at the exposed differential, a mess of gears he was clearly in no hurry to reassemble. "Sit down," he said, nodding toward a scarred metal stool.
"Why?"
"Because my back's killing me and I'm tired of craning my neck." He finally looked at Jacob, his eyes hollow in the bad light."Please."
The ‘please’ did it. Jacob had heard his brother say that word maybe twice in his adult life. He pulled the stool over, the legs shrieking against the concrete, and sat. The tension wasn't the sharp kind from a fight about to break out. It was a thick, suffocating blanket.
"So Letty told you about the bridge," Dom said. It wasn't a question.
"She did."
Dom picked up a wrench, just for something to hold. "Cat doesn't know she saw that. Still thinks it was just between us."
"You should've told someone." Jacob’s voice was flat. "A doctor.Anyone."
"And say what?" Dom's gaze snapped up, a flash of the old fire. "That we were in love and it was eating us alive? They'd have taken Mina. They'd have locked Cat in a room somewhere. They still might."
"It's not love, Dom. It's... something else."
"You think I don't know that?" The wrench clattered onto the tarp. "You think we had a name for it? We just had... each other. And then we had her. That's it. That's the whole story."
Jacob watched him. The raw honesty was disarming.
The raw honesty was disarming. Dom ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, a familiar gesture that now looked like he was trying to hold his skull together.
"It started after Dad," he said, staring at a grease spot on the floor. "Just being there for her. That’s all it was supposed to be."
"Being there doesn't end with a kid, Dom."
"I know." The words were whispered. "You think I don't know? Every night, man. Every single night I lie next to her and I know. I see Mina’s face in the morning and I know. The disgust... it's like a taste in my mouth that never rinses out."
He looked at Jacob, his eyes a desperate, bleak blue under the single hanging bulb. "You think I am not disgusted with myself? Because I am. I am disgusted in myself and I am so, so tired of being disgusted. And I am also... I am in love with her. With both of them. My sister and my daughter. What do you do with that, Jake? What the hell do you actually do?"
Jacob had no answer. The silence that followed was a physical weight. It was broken by the distant, lonely wail of a freight train horn echoing down the tracks outside.
The sound seemed to pull something taut in Dom. "She heard that, you know. The disgust. Last week. I was on the phone with the parts guy, got the price wrong. I muttered 'I’m so sick of this shit.' She was in the next room. Thought I meant... them."
He picked up the wrench again, his knuckles white. "She didn't say a word. Just got real quiet. You know how she gets."Jacob did. A stillness that wasn't peaceful. A silence that felt like a gathering storm.
"I tried to fix it," Dom said, his voice cracking with fatigue. "Told her I meant the job, the parts. She just nodded. Smiled that empty smile. Said it was fine." He dropped the wrench with a final-sounding thud. "It wasn't fine."
His phone, resting on the workbench, lit up. The screen cast a cold blue rectangle on the grimy concrete. Dom looked at it. His body went rigid.
"It's Letty," he said, his voice completely flat.
He answered, putting it on speaker. Before he could speak, Letty's voice came through, tinny and tight with a panic Jacob had never heard from her."Dom. She's at the bridge again.She called me. She's just... standing there. I'm ten minutes out. Where are you?"
The air was sucked out of the warehouse. Dom was already moving, a sudden, violent kinetic energy erupting from his slump.
"Riverside. The old Speedy-fit." He was snatching keys from the bench, his movements a frantic, graceless scramble. "I'm coming. Don't let her—"
"I won't. Just get here. Drive like you know how." The line went dead.
Dom didn't look at Jacob. He was a man reduced to pure function, a machine with one instruction. He shoved past the stool toward the driver's side of a beat-up silver pickup Jacob hadn't even noticed parked in the shadows.
"You can't drive like this," Jacob said, blocking his path.
"Get out of my way."
"Dom, you're shaking." It was true. A fine, visible tremor ran through his brother's hands. "Let me drive. You navigate."
Dom stared through him, his mind already on the bridge, on the railing, on the dark water. A war played out in his eyes. Pride.Terror. The absolute need to be the one who got there.
He thrust the keys into Jacob's chest."Go. Now."
They erupted from the bay door into the cool night, the truck's door hinges shrieking in protest. Jacob cranked the engine. It was an old V6, sluggish and loud. Dom barely had the passenger door closed before Jacob shoved it into reverse, gravel spraying.
"Take the 215," Dom said, pulling out his own phone, his thumb frantic on the screen. "She's not answering. She's not answering her phone."
Jacob pushed the truck hard, the speedometer climbing as they hit the on-ramp.
Jacob pushed the truck hard, the speedometer climbing as they hit the on-ramp. The engine screamed, a raw, unhealthy sound. Dom stared at his silent phone as if he could force it to ring through sheer will.
The freeway lights stuttered past in a sickening, rhythmic pulse. “Call Letty again,” Jacob said, his knuckles pale on the wheel. “Get her to keep talking. About anything.”
Dom hit a speed-dial and put it on speaker. It rang.And rang.
“Pick up, damn it,” he whispered to the empty cab.
Letty’s voice, when it finally came, was breathless, the sound of wind and fast footsteps in the background. “I’m on the walkway. I see her. About fifty yards south.”
“Is she on the rail?” Dom’s voice was a strained wire.
A pause filled with static and the hollow rush of open space. “No. She’s standing against it. Just… looking.”
“Don’t run at her,” Jacob cut in, his eyes scanning the thinning traffic, calculating lanes. “Just walk. Talk normal.”
“I know what I’m doing, Jacob.” Letty’s tone was sharp, then softened. “Cat? Hey, girl. It’s me.”
They couldn’t hear Catalina’s reply. The silence from the phone was worse than any scream. Dom pressed his forehead against the cold passenger window, his breath fogging the glass.
“Nice night for a view, huh?” Letty’s voice was forced casual, the sound of someone walking slowly on gravel. “Chilly, though. You must be freezing in that shirt.”
More static-filled quiet. Then, softly, they heard Catalina’s voice, thin and frayed. “I’m okay.”
“Yeah, you’re a popsicle.” A slight rustle. “Here, take my jacket. You’re shivering.”
“Don’t.”
“Take it, Cat. Or I’ll throw it in the damn bay.”
A shuffling sound. Dom closed his eyes.
Jacob took an exit too fast, the truck’s tires chirping in protest. They were on surface streets now, cutting through sleeping neighborhoods. He could see the arching silhouette of the bridge ahead, lit up like a cold, steel necklace against the sky.
“You called him, didn’t you?” Catalina’s voice was clearer now, resigned.
“Yeah. He’s coming.”
“I didn’t… I wasn’t going to do anything. I just needed to see it.”
“I know.” Letty’s voice was gentle. “The water’s real black tonight. Looks heavy.”
“It does.”
The line went quiet again, just the wind and the distant hum of the bridge. Dom’s hand found the door handle, his fingers tightening around it as if he could rip it free. He was poised on the edge of the seat, a muscle in his jaw jumping erratically.
Jacob swung the truck onto the bridge approach, the tires thumping over the expansion joints. The vast, dark expanse of the bay opened up below them, an abyss dotted with tiny boat lights.
“Where are you?” Dom barked into the phone.
“South walkway. Halfway. We’re just… talking.”
“Don’t stop talking.” Jacob said it more to his brother than to Letty.
He skidded the truck into a prohibited service pull-out, gravel flying. Dom was out before the vehicle fully stopped, launching himself over a low concrete barrier.
“Dom!” Jacob killed the engine and scrambled after him.
The walkway was a narrow, dimly lit path suspended beside the roaring traffic. The wind here was a living thing, howling up from the water, carrying the salt-sting of the ocean and the exhaust from eight lanes of cars. It tore at their clothes.
Jacob saw them fifty yards ahead. Letty’s sturdy outline in her work coveralls, one arm extended. And Catalina, small and slight, wrapped in what must be Letty’s jacket, her back to the railing.
Dom didn’t run. He walked, but with a terrifying, focused intensity. Each step was deliberate, like a man approaching a sleeping predator.
Letty saw him and gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. She took a single step back, giving him space. Catalina hadn’t turned. She was looking down at her hands on the cold metal railing.
He stopped a few feet from her. Jacob hung back, the wind whipping his words away if he tried to speak.
“Cat.” Dom’s voice was rough, scraped raw by the wind and fear.
She didn’t move.
“Look at me.”
Slowly, she turned. In the jaundiced glow of the safety lights, her face was drained of all color, her eyes dark holes. The jacket swallowed her. She looked fourteen again, and utterly lost.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. It wasn’t an accusation. It sounded like genuine confusion, like he’d found her on the surface of the moon.
“Thinking,” she said. Her voice was carried off by the wind, and he had to lean closer to catch it. “About the water. How it wouldn’t… judge anything. It would just be cold. And then it would be over.”
“No.” The word was flat, absolute.
“Dom, I’m so tired.” A tear broke free, tracing a line down her cheek. It wasn’t a sob; it was a simple leak, as if her body had too much sorrow to hold. “I’m tired of the hiding. I’m tired of feeling like a crime. I look at Mina and I see… us. Our mistake. And I love her so much it feels like dying.”
Dom closed the distance between them in one step. He didn’t grab her. He put his hands flat on the railing on either side of her, caging her in without touching. His forehead came to rest against hers.
“She’s not a mistake,” he said, the words a warm cloud in the cold air between their faces. “Listen to me. She is the one thing we did right. The only clean thing.”
“How is she clean?” A desperate whisper.
“Because she doesn’t know. To her, it’s just love.Simple. That’s what we give her.” He shifted one hand, his thumb brushing away the tear on her cheek. It was a gesture of shocking tenderness in that brutal, windy place. “The rest of it… the sick shit in our heads, the world… that’s ours to carry.Not hers. And we carry it. We don’t put it down in the water. We carry it for her.”
Catalina’s eyes searched his. She was trembling violently now, but not from the cold. The facade, the quiet strength she showed the world, had completely dissolved. What was left was raw, terrified exhaustion.
“I don’t know if I can anymore.”
“You can. For one more minute. Then another.” He kept his voice low, just for her. “That’s all it is. A lifetime of minutes. And I’m in every one of them with you. You’re not alone in this. You hear me? Never alone.”
Jacob watched from ten feet away, the scene both too intimate to witness and impossible to look away from. This wasn't a lover's quarrel. It was triage. This was his brother performing field surgery on a wound that kept opening, using only his voice and his presence to stitch it shut.
Letty stood a little further back, arms crossed, a silent sentinel.
Catalina’s breath hitched. A low, wounded sound escaped her. She leaned forward, her forehead pressing harder against his. “It hurts, Dom. All the time.”
“I know.” He shifted again, finally sliding one arm around her shoulders, pulling her gently away from the rail and into him. She came, her body folding against his chest, her face buried in his neck. He held her, his own eyes squeezed shut, his large hand cradling the back of her head. “I know it does.”
They stood like that for a long time, a single dark shape against the vast, indifferent night. The bridge vibrated with the traffic. The wind screamed. They didn't move.
Jacob finally looked away, his own throat tight. He met Letty’s gaze. Her expression was grim, knowing. It wasn’t over. It would never be over. This was just the eye of the storm, a temporary stillness bought with words on a windy bridge. The next wave would come.
“Hey,” Letty said, her voice carrying over the wind. She was looking at her phone. “Jacob, your phone’s been buzzing. Your mom. A bunch.”
The real world crashed back in. Mia. His mother. The devastated kitchen.Dom heard. He opened his eyes, his chin resting on top of Catalina’s head. He looked over at Jacob, the earlier desperation replaced by a heavy, resolute fatigue. A commander assessing the next battlefront.
“We have to go home,” Dom said, not a question.
Catalina stiffened in his arms.
“Mia…” she started.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said, but it sounded less certain. He turned her slightly, keeping an arm around her. “We can’t stay out here. It’s cold. And Mom…” He looked at Jacob again, a silent question passing between them.
Jacob gave a short, tight nod. The united front was temporary, necessary. “My truck’s right there.”
They walked back in a grim, silent procession. Letty led, a scowl on her face for the world. Dom guided Catalina, his hand on her back. Jacob followed, feeling like an outsider in his own family’s collapse.
At the truck, Catalina paused, her eyes on the dark water one last time. It wasn’t longing, Jacob thought. It was an acknowledgement.
Then she got in the truck.
Dom climbed in after her, folding his large frame into the cramped back seat beside her. Jacob started the engine. The drive back was wordless. It was filled with the truck’s rattling complaints and the soft, shuddering breaths of his sister as she leaned against the window and quietly cried.
No one asked where they were going. Jacob drove toward the only place left: the house with the scarred kitchen table and the stain that wouldn’t lift.
He wondered, as the city lights approached, what waited for them there. He wondered if Mia was still gone. He wondered if his mother had finished scrubbing. He wondered if any of them knew how to be a family again after today, or if they were now just a collection of people bound by shared damage, orbiting a secret that felt, in that moment, as vast and dark as the bay beneath the bridge.