𝑺𝒆𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒕𝒔

January 19. 72 days left.

He heard it before he saw it.

Two voices, maybe three, the pitch and cadence of boys who thought volume was the same as power. Laughter with an edge to it. And underneath, quieter, a voice he recognized.

Theodore pulled at the lead. Fayiz had been walking south on Duckworth toward The Classic, the usual route, Theodore investigating the usual lampposts with his usual forensic commitment, and the morning had been unremarkable until this: the alley beside the diner, the narrow cut between the building and the hardware store next door, and the sound of someone being made small.

He came around the corner.

Three of them. Seventeen, eighteen, somewhere in that territory where boys had the size of men and the cruelty of children.

One of them wore a school rugby jacket two seasons out of date, the crest half-peeled at the shoulder. Another had a chipped front tooth he kept worrying with his tongue, like he was testing whether it still belonged to him. The third, the one standing closest to Saoirse, had a small black cross tattooed just below his ear, inked too dark and too deep, the kind you got in someone's kitchen at seventeen and regretted at twenty.

She was still in her work clothes, the diner apron balled in her fist, and she was looking at the ground, and Fayiz recognized the posture because he'd held it himself once, in a schoolyard in Kochi. The heat. The uniform sticking to the back of his knees. The particular quality of being looked at by boys who knew his father's name and had decided, without asking, that the son owed them something. Shoulders curled inward. Making himself small in a way that never actually worked.

The boy in front was talking. "...told you last week, yeah? Last week. And here we are. Tuesday now, isn't it? So that's..."

"I'll have it," Saoirse said. Her voice was steady, which was impressive, because her hands weren't. "I just need..."

"You just need. You always just need. Your brother said the same thing."

Fayiz stopped walking. Theodore, sensing the change in the lead, sat down on the pavement and looked up at him.

There was a version of this where he walked past. Where he kept his head down and went into the diner and ordered coffee and this was someone else's problem, someone else's alley, someone else's girl backed up against a dumpster. He'd gotten efficient at that in New York. Minding his own business. It was the first skill the city taught you.

Theodore stood up. Pulled toward the alley.

"Fine," Fayiz said. To the dog. Who was already moving.

He walked into the alley and didn't slow down. The trick was momentum. The trick was making it look like you belonged somewhere more than the people who were already there. He'd learned this from his father, ironically, the man walked into every room like he owned the deed.

"Saoirse." He said it calmly, like he was calling her to a table. "Dottie needs you inside. Something with the grill."

The three boys turned. The one closest to Saoirse straightened up and looked at Fayiz with the particular expression of a young man recalculating. Fayiz was tall, and he was older, and he was holding a lead attached to a dog that had begun growling in a way that was disproportionate to his size, and more than anything he was standing in the mouth of the alley with the unearned confidence of a man who had grown up being told he was the eldest son of the Marakkar family and that meant something.

It was, he reflected, the one useful thing his father had given him.

Theodore had stopped pulling at the lead and was making a sound Fayiz had only ever heard him make once before, at the landlord, who was a large man. It was a small sound. It carried.

The boy in front looked at Fayiz. Looked at Saoirse. Looked at Theodore, who was now showing teeth.

"We were just talking," the boy said.

"Talking's over," Fayiz said.

A beat. The math happening behind the boy's eyes: was this worth it, was the audience worth it, was the moment passing. It passed. The boy stepped back. The other two followed, the way water follows gravity, and they walked out the other end of the alley without looking back, and Fayiz exhaled a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.

Theodore stopped growling. Sniffed the air. Found nothing worth pursuing. Sat down.

Saoirse was still standing against the dumpster. The apron was crushed in her fist. Her face was doing something complicated: relief, then shame, then the particular exhaustion of someone who was tired of being rescued, or tired of needing to be.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine." She said it the way people said it when they weren't. She smoothed the apron. Folded it. Her hands were shaking and she folded it anyway, the way you did things when you needed to do something. "They're justm... it's nothing. It's stupid."

"It's not stupid."

She looked at him. Up close, without the diner counter between them, she looked younger than she had an hour ago. Distress did that. Stripped the performance off. The freckles. The chapped lips. The coat that was too thin for January, the kind of coat you wore when you didn't have the other kind.

"How much do you owe them?"

Her face changed. "I don't..."

"Saoirse."

She looked at the ground. At Theodore. At the ground again. "It's not me. It's my brother. Declan. He borrowed off them last summer for Mam's heating and then he... Declan doesn't pay things back. He's not... he's not a bad person, he just... he doesn't work. Neither of them do. Kieran either. It's me and Mam and the tips from here and it's not..." She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Tried again. "It's not enough. So they come to me because Declan won't answer his phone and I'm the one they can find."

Fayiz looked at her. Nineteen years old. Thin coat. Two brothers who didn't work. A mother and a heating bill and a debt that wasn't hers and a job at a diner where she earned tips and a crush on a man she couldn't afford to have and a life that was already heavier than most people's at twice her age.

"How much?"

"Three hundred. It was two hundred but there's... interest, or whatever they call it." She said interest like it was a word from another language. "Please don't tell Dottie. Please. She'll... I can't lose this job. It's the only one I've got."

"I'm not going to tell Dottie."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

She looked at him and he could see the moment she decided to believe him, the tiny release in her shoulders, the exhale. Then the other thing happened. The thing he'd been trying not to see for weeks. Her green eyes went soft and her cheeks coloured and he watched the crush resettle itself over the gratitude like a second skin, and he thought: she is nineteen and she is in trouble and she needs someone who can actually solve things, and he was a man who ate rice for dinner three nights a week and couldn't sell a painting.

"Three hundred dollars," he said. "Let me..."

"No." Sharp. Immediate. The steadiest her voice had been. "Absolutely not. I'm not... I'm handling it. I just need more shifts. I'm handling it."

He held up both hands. "Okay."

"Okay." She straightened up. Uncrumpled the apron. Tied it around her waist with the focus of someone putting armour on. "I have to... the grill thing. You said Dottie needed..."

"There's no grill thing."

She stared at him.

"I made it up."

A beat. Then: "You should practice that."

"I know. Go inside. It's freezing."

She went. At the door she turned, and her face did the thing again, the flush, the almost-eye-contact, the retreat. "Thank you." Quiet. And then she was inside, the door closing behind her, and Fayiz was standing in the alley with Theodore and the cold and the knowledge that he would think about three hundred dollars for the rest of the day.

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